Brothers
by OughtaKnowBetter
Summary: 2.3 billion dollars. Four brothers. One big mess. Crossover with Simon & Simon. Story complete.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: standard disclaimer, disavowing any knowledge of the story below, the characters therein, and any similarity to canon is pure coincidence. Any sum of money that has impacted this work has not ended up in my hands. In fact, I'd probably be richer if I spent my time working on real life issues instead of this fic...

I'd like to thank my beta's, FraidyCat and SerialGal, for their excellent work. This story would not have been half so well-written without their input. Any errors are mine, for failing to listen to their good advice.

* * *

Brothers

By OughtaKnowBetter

_Speed_.

There was always a certain exhilaration in achieving velocities not available to the average man. Despite the circumstances, Dr. Charles Eppes, genius extraordinaire, found himself unable to resist calculating the variables currently in play: the speed of the vehicle that he was driving, the horsepower of the engine under the hood, the resistance of the guardrail that the aforementioned vehicle had just careened through, and the angle of the slope which would determine just how many times his vehicle tapped the rocky ground and flipped over and over before coming to an exhausted rest on the forested ground below.

His last coherent thought, before blackness overtook him, was that his passenger, Dr. Andrew J. Simon, was quite likely calculating the estimated cost of repairs to the vehicle, the blue book value of the damaged hybrid car, and whether it would be cost-effective to put said vehicle back on the road in any shape other than on top of a flat-bed tow truck to cart it off to the junk yard. After all, Prof. Simon's expertise was in forensic accounting.

* * *

_Two days previously:_

He never noticed the shadow through the frosted window of his office door, but the firm repeated rap on the wooden frame managed to attract his attention. A golden head poked its way in, the blond hair spiked here and there with the occasional gray thread indicating that his visitor was older than Charlie himself. Here on CalSci, that was not an anomaly. There were many staff members significantly older than Charlie; Charlie himself was the anomaly.

He was conducting office hours at the time, though none of Charlie's students had availed themselves of the offer. Charlie had decided to take it as evidence of his superior lecturing skills rather than laziness on the part of his students, and had moved on with pleasure to do some rather fanciful work on one aspect of the Cognitive Emergence theorem that he was developing. It was a doubtful hypothesis, this part of the theory, but part of the fun of developing the proof was to explore the concept and either prove or disprove it conclusively. After all, some bright wit out there in academia would be certain to come up with the same thought and challenge Dr. Eppes to refute it in the academic journals. Better to derive the solution prior to that happenstance. It was hard work being a genius, but a little forethought made it that much easier.

However, none of Charlie's students were over thirty, therefore the head did not belong to a student of his. This piqued his interest. "Can I help you?"

"Dr. Eppes?" The body eased itself in past the door with a level of confidence that students rarely possessed: more evidence that his visitor was not a student. In fact, Charlie thought that he'd seen the man before, somewhere nearby, somewhere familiar…

The man stuck out his hand. "I'm Andrew Simon, from the School of Business."

It clicked. Charlie had seen him in the Faculty Club, a place noted for food well above the quality found in the student dorms, and a place where Charlie had placed plenty of take-out orders for those times when treating his graduate students to a good meal seemed like the sensible thing to do. Charlie had seen the man there, entertaining others and taking a break from teaching and research.

_Always happy to meet new people_. Charlie shook the man's hand. "Charlie Eppes. What can I do for you, Dr. Simon?"

Simon winced. "Call me A.J.," he requested, clarifying the desired quality of the relationship. "I need a favor."

Charlie grinned. "Which, in my case usually means some really fun applied math. And, since you're from the School of Business, this sounds like I'm going to get to stretch my wings a bit. What project are you working on?"

"Well, it's not really so much a _project_ as kind of a hornet's nest that I stumbled upon," A.J. confessed. "There's not going to be any kind of publication out of this. Rather, not anything you can publish in an academic journal."

"You're intriguing me." Charlie gestured to the chairs in his office, realized that the visitor's chair held a stack of tests, and hastened to clean it off. The stack of tests ended up on the floor next to a similar stack, also on the floor. "Let's sit down."

Once seated, A.J. steepled his fingers and pondered how to begin. "Like you, Dr. Eppes—"

"Charlie."

"—Charlie." A.J. accepted the correction without blinking. "Like yourself, I take on the occasional outside consulting project."

"Helps give my accountant heart failure," Charlie interjected wryly.

"Yes, well, _I _am my accountant, and I suspect that your clients are rather more well-heeled than mine," A.J. said, "especially the ones funded by my tax dollars and going by the sobriquet of Uncle Sam." He moved on to the more pertinent pieces of his dilemma. "My area of specialty, Charlie, is forensic accounting. I figure out who has caused substantial sums of money to disappear as well as the current location of those sums. There's the occasional throwback who uses money laundering to get what he wants, but mostly these days people use various economic dodges to hide their money. If I were solely in private practice, I'd be tracking down funds to be split during divorce proceedings with the odd CFO trying to embezzle funds prior to making a disappearance. I gave up that sort of thing years ago."

"You had your own accounting practice?" Charlie asked.

That elicited a crooked grin from his guest. "Not exactly. Actually, I was a private investigator, then an attorney for a while, before going after the Ph.D. Still have a license for each of them, although my investigations these days begin and end at my desk and probably don't require a PI license. Still, old habits die hard."

Looking at the man, Charlie wasn't so sure. Dr. Andrew Simon, despite hovering around sixty years of age, had clearly kept himself in shape. "You were a private investigator? As in, sneaking around corners at midnight sort of thing, taking infrared photos of people who didn't want to be seen?"

"Made my living that way for several years," Dr. Simon told him proudly. "I'm not about to say it was a _good_ living, but I survived. I formed an agency with my brother. Then we both got the itch to move on, and things sort of fell apart. I headed back to graduate school and academia."

"And your brother?" Charlie pictured yet another college professor, this one with leather patches on the elbows of a merino sweater, perhaps teaching at some genteel liberal college back East that had gone co-ed in the last decade. Vassar, perhaps?

A.J. Simon followed his host's thoughts all too clearly, and grinned. "No, Rick was more along the lines of a black sheep. If you can believe it, he won the lottery. Not a grand prize, not millions of dollars, but a sufficient amount that I invested it for him and it now churns out enough to keep him comfortable. Let me qualify that," he added. "It keeps Rick comfortable as long as he doesn't get involved in any ridiculous schemes or too many beer binges with old buddies. Which is what I thought was going on, at first."

"Now we get to the heart of the matter." Charlie eased back in his chair. "What's the story?"

A.J. wasn't quite ready. "Let me just make certain of something, first. You have a brother with the FBI, right?"

"That's right. Why?"

A.J. cocked his head and relaxed into the chair. "I just need to be certain of where you stand. Some of the things I'm going to talk about may be marginally illegal, and I wouldn't want to put you into a position where you felt that you had to discuss this with your brother in an official capacity."

Charlie started to protest, then thought better of it. "I appreciate that. What can you tell me?"

"Let me start at the beginning." A.J. settled back in his chair. This was going to be a long one. "I keep a number of contacts in the community; business owners and financial types, people that I've done business for and some of whom are just friends that I respect. One of them, a man named Mitch Felsner, came to me recently with a concern."

"Which was?"

A.J. dodged the question. "Mitch and I have known each other for many years. I met him shortly after my thesis defense; one of my examiners on my Ph.D. board suggested to Mitch that he look me up for a problem that he was having at the time." A.J. grinned suddenly. "As a direct result of my analysis, Mitch dumped the stock that he had in a certain business and got out of the market just before the all went broke. He's a millionaire, in part because he consulted me, and he's never forgotten it. He's a good friend."

"But he has a concern," Charlie prodded. History was great, but Charlie needed to hear where history became current events.

"Yeah." A.J. leaned forward, suddenly serious. "As I said, Mitch is a good friend, and he came to me for a professional consultation. He still dabbles in stocks, not like he used to do—he's a terror on the golf course now—but still does enough to take routine trips to the Caribbean on his yacht, and I do mean _yacht_. The big expensive type of yacht that comes equipped with its own crew of eight, not counting the maitre d'."

"He came to you." This was getting tiresome.

A.J. took pity on him. "Mitch was thinking that someone, somewhere, was draining away some of his assets. The numbers just weren't adding up. Not enough to bring on shock and awe, just enough so that unless you were very sharp—and believe me, Mitch is _plenty_ sharp—you wouldn't notice anything until you were out a few hundred thousand or so."

Charlie cut to the chase. "You investigated. What did you find?"

"Something very interesting." A.J. refused to be rushed. "I did indeed find that someone was siphoning off funds, diverting them slowly but surely into an offshore account."

"So far, pretty straight-forward. You could have reported this to the cops, to the D.A.'s office," Charlie observed. "What stopped you?"

"The name of the person who was doing the siphoning," A.J. replied promptly.

"Do I get to know this name?" _And how does this turn into a math problem?_

A.J. hesitated, then spit it out. "My brother."

Charlie sucked in his breath. "Uh-oh."

Crooked and unhappy grin. "You said it."

There was something wrong with this conversation, and Charlie puzzled it out. "But you don't think that he's guilty, and you have evidence to back your theory. Otherwise you wouldn't have come here to me; me, with my brother the FBI agent."

"Exactly." A.J. nodded, pleased with his fellow professor's insight. "Forget that Rick Simon is my brother. Rick's done a lot of things in his life that I don't want to think about but, frankly, these sorts of financial shenanigans are beyond him. If he was going to rob someone, he'd walk up to them with a handgun and demand their wallet. For Rick, devious behavior means watering the whiskey underneath the bar."

"You're sure—"

"I'm sure." A.J. cut him off. "Rick has no drive for money. He's far happier lounging on his boat and feeding that mutt of his."

"So who's doing this?" Charlie asked. They were still in A.J.'s territory.

"I'm sure you've heard of identity theft," A.J. said. "That's what's going on here. Someone stole Rick's identity and is using his good name to smuggle money to more than one offshore account. If someone like me comes along and starts looking for the perpetrator, I get led straight to Rick. Who, by the way, has reacted in a very predictable fashion by loudly denying any involvement, just what you'd expect a criminal to do. If it wasn't for the fact that they picked Rick as their patsy, I'd have spent a few weeks tracking down all the avenues that the money was moving along before concluding that Rick was a red herring. It would have delayed any official investigation for months, at a minimum."

Charlie nodded. It made sense. He would have come to the same conclusion had it been Don, or even his father. "So we can take it as a given that your brother is an innocent dupe. Where do I come in?"

A.J. warmed to his topic. "I've got several hundred possible leads, all of which lead to further combinations. I could track each and every one of them down; I could also resign from CalSci and spend the next year doing it and only get halfway through the workload. I need a better way of identifying the top contenders."

"So you came to me." Charlie's brain was already at work on the problem. "Let's look at the criteria. What have you got?" He pushed paper at A.J., eager to get on with a new problem.

A.J. grabbed the pen, just as fired up now that Charlie had accepted his invitation. "First: quantity of money. No sum under one hundred dollars and none over one thousand."

"Excellent. Top and bottom limiting filters. More?"

"I've identified at least seventy different brokers, some that are used more than others."

"Very good. I can break that down into usage probabilities." The brain cells of both professors were whirling.

"Bayesian filters?"

"Better than that." Charlie's eyes glittered. "Markovian discrimination, the next level of filter. Instead of using discrete entities, it essentially links 'phrases' together to produce a higher probability of success. A lot of spam filters use the process, and we can adapt the principle for our purposes." He pulled his laptop around. "Give me the data points that you have. I'll set up the field equations, and get you your answer."

"How long?" Clearing his brother's name was important to A.J. Simon.

Charlie grinned. "I'm aiming to finish inputting the equations shortly before midnight, with the answer popping out sometime before morning. Join me for coffee first thing, before classes start, and we'll go over the results. That fast enough?"

"Wow." Prof. Simon was impressed. "You've just compressed three years' work into an afternoon."

"Not really," Charlie demurred. "All I'm doing is sorting out which of your identified leads has the greatest probability of success. I'm just focusing your resources. Works for you, Dr. Simon?"

"Works for me, Dr. Eppes."


	2. Brothers 2

The phone rang.

A.J. considered, staring at his face in the mirror of his bathroom, dodging the small water spots that dotted the surface. This morning's steam from the shower had already faded away. Option A: finish brushing his teeth. Option B: postpone cleaning his teeth in favor of listening to a computerized voice suggesting that he get his carpets cleaned for a healthy sum of money at great inconvenience to his already crowded schedule. At seven in the morning, there was little doubt as to which was the more attractive option, especially since he needed to get to CalSci a little faster today to meet that professor of math, Charlie Eppes. Nice guy, even if he was a little on the young side. At his age, A.J. remembered, A.J. himself was running around after cases and girls, hoping to find the right mix. Usually he found himself on the wrong end of a loaded pistol, but that was another story…

Let the answering machine get it. A.J. heard his own recorded voice inviting the caller to leave a message, going for that mix of _are you a friend who is supposed to have my home phone or a student trying to make me nervous by tracking down my personal data?_

Neither.

"Yo! A.J.! Pick up, dammit! I need to talk to you!"

_Rick_. A.J. sighed, spit the toothpaste leavings out of his mouth, and sauntered over to the phone, all the while wondering if he should just let Rick spout off for a while onto the machine and then call him back later in the day when hopefully he had more answers.

No, might as well get it over with. If he didn't talk to Rick now, then A.J.'s cell phone would rack up fifteen messages before the noon hour hit, and that was if he was lucky. Rick himself didn't bother with a cell—_why should I? Anybody who wants me knows where to find me, and the boat's got a phone_—but that didn't mean that he didn't take full advantage of anyone—like his younger brother—who carried one routinely. A.J. sighed again, and picked up the handset. "Good morning, Rick." Determined to be sociable because, after all, this was early for Rick. His brother rarely rose before noon.

"You got anything yet?"

"No. Do you?" Referencing the fact that there was a mound of papers on one end of the kitchen table in Rick's home. Those papers ought to have been signed and then filed in the appropriate places as well as copies sent to the receiving organizations several months previously, but A.J. had long since despaired of imposing order onto his brother. Rick's assignment, once A.J. had discovered the current problem, was to sort those papers into _Junk Mail_ and _Everything Else for A.J. to Look At and Decide Whether to Throw It Out or Not_.

"Yeah, A.J., I do. I've got this really official looking paper from some island nation I've never heard of, and they're not inviting me to come down and invest in real estate."

A.J. kept his cool. Knowing his brother, this still could be some fancy advertising. "What does it say, Rick?"

"It talks about some sort of bank account that I need to sign for. The Grand Bank of New Zuleika, in the Caribbean," Rick read off to him. "And it's got more than a simple average stamp on it. Somebody wasted some big bucks on postage."

A.J. found himself getting cautiously excited. He wouldn't be certain until he rechecked his data, but he was fairly sure that the institution that Rick had just named was one of the suspect banks that he'd given Dr. Eppes as a potential hot spot. Hah! Maybe he wouldn't need to wait for Dr. Eppes' algorithms to point him in the right direction. Maybe Rick's letter would be all that was necessary. "Rick, I need to see that letter. Can you get it up to me?"

"Sure thing." There was a pause. A.J. could just imagine his brother thinking through his 'busy' schedule. "Cramer's got a vet appointment for one this afternoon. I get through that maybe by two, two-thirty, then I could mosey on up to your place—"

"Rick," A.J. interrupted.

"Yes, A.J.?"

"Use the fax."

"What fax?"

"The fax machine that I hooked up to your computer."

"A.J., you hooked up a printer to my computer."

"Rick, it's a three way. It prints, it scans, it faxes. Use it. Use it to send me a copy of the stuff from New Zuleika."

"I have a fax? What do I need with a fax machine?"

"You need to fax me a copy of that letter that you found." A.J. kept his temper. It was all an act. Rick was just as smart as he was, and right now his older brother was using all of his smarts to avoid doing anything resembling work either now or in the future. Once Rick acknowledged possession of technological skills, he'd lose A.J.'s contributions to that part of his life. Rick was no dummy. "Take each page, insert it onto the top of the fax-printer, and dial in my fax number. The machine will do the rest."

"What's your fax number?"

A.J. chose not to remind his brother that he'd pasted a copy of those numbers onto the wall over Rick's computer. Knowing Rick, the paper may well have become a substitute dartboard. "Hit these buttons, Rick." He dictated the fax number, digit by digit. "Now press the button that says dial."

"There is no button that says 'dial', A.J."

"How about the one that says 'send'?"

"Got that." The familiar sound of a fax in motion edged into the phone, and A.J. relaxed—but only just.

"I'll take a look at it later today," he promised his brother, knowing that he'd be grabbing the paper from his own end of the fax as soon as he got onto the CalSci campus. "I have class all day until then," he lied, just to keep this brother from pestering him during the morning. The only class Prof. Simon was scheduled to teach today was at one and over before three, and A.J. intended to look at his brother's information well before then.

"Got it. Don't keep me waiting, A.J. The suspense is killing me. This is my money, you know."

"I know." A.J. tried to sound sincere. It wasn't Rick's money; it was Mitch's, and a few hundred other wealthy and not so wealthy people's money. It was Rick's _name_ that was being dragged through the mud. "I'll call you later, Rick."

"You'd better," Rick replied darkly before hanging up.

A.J. shook his head. Not gonna read anything into that, he decided. Rick's always grumpy when he wakes up earlier than ten.

* * *

"Uh-oh." 

"'Uh-oh'?" Charlie repeated. It was close to eleven. Charlie had postponed their early morning meeting when his laptop indicated that it wasn't up to the demands that Charlie had placed upon it overnight, so a quick phone call had rescheduled the joint project consultation until Charlie finished his nine o'clock class and before A.J.'s o'clock. Charlie snatched up his laptop immediately after class and hustled over to A.J.'s office to go over what Charlie's algorithms had pointed out for special attention.

Charlie had pulled the figures up on the laptop's screen, inviting A.J. to take a look. Charlie leaned forward, trying to see what the accounting professor was concerned about. "'Uh-oh', what? What are you seeing?"

"This." A.J. pointed at one name. "And this." He pointed at another. "And this, and this, and this—"

"Right. What do they all mean?"

"It means that my brother Rick is in deep doo doo."

"We already knew that. What do these names mean to you? What's their significance?"

"One word: organized crime."

That stopped Charlie on two issues, one of which was a lot scarier than the other, so he focused on the less scary one. "That's two words."

"But one big _big_ problem," A.J. clarified. "I think, Dr. Eppes, that we've stumbled onto someone's illegal business operations, by sheer accident." He traced a sum of money wandering through Charlie's equations. "This route you've deciphered? This one takes some of Mitch's money, puts it into Rick's name, and then dumps it into this dummy account in New Zuleika. From there I lose it, but it doesn't matter. The US won't be able to impact it in another country; we'll have to try to cut off the flow right here…" He trailed off, eyes glazing over.

"A.J.?" Charlie stared at his colleague. _Is this how others see me, when I work on math?_

A.J. sighed heavily, giving up his idea. "No. Tempting, but no. Too dangerous."

"What's too dangerous?"

A.J. acquired a wicked grin. "We have the perfect way to cut off the flow. At least, a substantial portion of it, the part that's staring us in the face."

Charlie Eppes too was a genius. He saw where A.J. Simon was going immediately. "We have your brother use the fact that his name is on the account to cut it off. What's so dangerous about that?"

A.J. knew better. "Because someone is going to notice, and come looking for that money and, by extension, for Rick. Of course, Rick can look out for himself and, with warning, he can hide better than anyone that I know. But we'd better leave that as the last option, don't you think?"

"You're right," Charlie had to agree. "I hadn't thought of that. How about taking this to my brother? I'm sure that he'd be thrilled; a case already identified and solved and handed to him on a silver platter."

"Not completely solved," A.J. had to tell him. "We know the money flows, but we haven't identified all of the players." He perused the data once more, then consulted the clock on the wall. "I've got a bit of time before my one o'clock class. Why don't I see where some of these channels go, maybe make a few inquiries? That letter of Rick's ought to give me something to work with."

"Sounds good," Charlie agreed. "I'll try to refine these probabilities a bit more, now that we've narrowed down the possibilities. That will make your work more precise. Then we can take this whole thing to Don later this afternoon. Deal?"

"Deal." A.J. grinned engagingly. "See you later, Prof. Eppes."

* * *

In all the years that he'd been a private investigator, A.J. reflected, he'd never been to the FBI headquarters in L.A. It was an impressive building, built of heavy bricks with small windows looking out over the street. The whole thing screamed _solid!_ Even the glass in the front lobby seemed thick and impervious to bullets; not such a bad idea, he thought, given the things that were happening today. He could have used some of the toys that Charlie took for granted: the metal detector that they had to walk through, the video cameras that taped every single person that walked in for additional identification should the need be there, the guards dotting edges of the room and ready to move in at the first sign of trouble. Even the receptionist, Charlie had confided to him, was armed and dangerous. A.J. had his doubts—the woman looked old enough and gray enough to have grandkids—but after all his years on the edge of law enforcement, A.J. Simon had learned not to judge a book by its cover. He'd been fooled far too many times. 

He was also impressed by the easy way that Charlie was admitted into the inner sanctum. Clearly his young colleague was well known here, the receptionist handing over an ID badge that had long ago lost its crisp new edges and creating a temporary one for A.J. himself simply on Charlie's say-so. It didn't mean that the receptionist didn't eye him carefully and it didn't mean that A.J. didn't have to pull out his driver's license for verification, but it was obvious that Charlie had some pull.

The elevator deposited them on the fourth floor, and Charlie guided them through the hallway, through a fast moving stream of humanity. A.J. gave up trying to see everything and concentrated on keeping up with his escort.

Charlie pushed them into a small cubicle in a warren of cubicles, knowing exactly where he was headed. He directed them into the one that contained a harried looking dark-haired man. The man behind the desk bore little resemblance to Charlie, but he clearly knew his visitor and waved the pair of them into chairs while he continued to talk on the phone, not worried about what was being overheard. "That's right, Megan; stick on their asses like toilet paper. They're headed back to Eiger, and we need that connection. Send David back to me so that he can coordinate the Hausbrau angle. Listen, you think can spare Colby? I'm running out of people, and I need someone for that Taco Tilly woman. You can? Thanks, Megan. Keep an eye on the time; we gotta hit 'em all at exactly noon tomorrow. I hope you don't have any plans for tonight." Pause for a response. A.J. saw a rueful grin cross the man's face along with a guilty glance at Charlie. "Hey, you weren't really interested in the guy, were you? Besides, I just rescued you from trying to cook a meal with only white foods." Another pause, and a small chuckle. "Keep me posted, Megan. It's all coming together, and by one tomorrow it'll all be a bad dream for several someones." He replaced the phone in its cradle and finally took in his visitors. "Hey, Charlie. Good to see you. What's the occasion? I'm a little busy right now," he added apologetically, waving his arms at the piles of papers on his desk, and at the phone with a call waiting. Even as they watched, the light bleeped out, signaling that the caller had gotten tired of waiting. The computer beeped warningly at him, telling him that it too desired and required attention.

"If we're right, then you're about to get busier," Charlie informed him with a grin. "Don, I'd like you to meet Professor Andrew Simon, from CalSci's School of Business. A.J., my brother Don."

"Pleasure." A.J. stuck out his hand to be shaken. "I've heard a lot about you."

"Yeah, well, you can't believe everything that Charlie tells you. Let me qualify that: you can only believe it if it involves math." Don leaned back in his chair. "Chuck, I hate to rush you, but I'm really swamped with this case. What's this about?"

"Don, I think we've discovered the money channels that a group of organized crime figures is using to hide their profits—"

"Tell me one thing: is this going to go anywhere before five PM tomorrow?" Don interrupted.

A.J. looked at Charlie. Charlie looked at A.J.

Charlie grimaced. "No. Probably not."

"Right. Then, while I really appreciate the civic-minded thing, I'm going to have to postpone this discussion until then. I can't give it any time right now, not with this monkey on my back. Tell you what, buddy," and Don was honestly trying to make amends, "tell Dad to plan on making some of his lasagna for dinner tomorrow night. We'll spend tomorrow evening going over what you've got and see if we can take it anywhere. Okay?"

Charlie sighed. "I understand. A.J., that's an invite to dinner. Are you free?" He rose, signaling that the interview was over, and far too quickly.

"I am," A.J. told them both. "Nice meeting you, Don."

"Same here." Don had already dismissed his brother and his brother's guest from his thoughts. His current case was taking precedence.


	3. Brothers 3

Charlie pulled into the parking lot, the one closest to the Business building where A.J.'s office was, intending to drop his colleague off before heading back to his own haunts. He almost regretted turning the car off and removing the air conditioner from the immediate vicinity, feeling the sun already pouring to approaching summer's heat onto the roof overhead. "You've got better landscaping," he observed, noting the azaleas that were still in bloom and the desert yucca that sent tall stalks spiraling skyward. "What, they like you better than us math types?"

A.J. grinned. "No. But we've got Professor Hildegard Makenschnaucker. Would you want to tell her no when she asks for petunias?"

Charlie laughed. "Not in this lifetime. I've never met her but even from afar she scares me."

A.J. agreed. "We made her department head, just to have her fight our battles. It works, too: in a place called CalSci, emphasis on the _Sci_, we've successfully held our own. We may specialize in business, but we're not stupid, Prof. Eppes." His cell phone whirred at him in the supposedly 'silent' mode, and he flipped it open after first glancing at the name on the screen. "Hey, Rick." He'd have to talk to his brother some time, and now was as good a time as any. "Wait a sec; I'm putting you on speaker. Charlie Eppes is with me, Rick. He's the mathematician I was telling you about."

"Hi, Rick."

"Hey, Charlie. Listen, guy, you gotta get better friends than my brother. A.J., you got that letter I faxed you, right?"

"Yup. Got it right away." _Because that's how a fax works, brother mine_. Sibling rivalry could go both ways.

"You got anything on it?"

"You could say that." A.J. shifted the volume control upward. "Rick, we uncovered some very scary connections with this thing. We've turned it over to the FBI."

"The FBI?" Rick was impressed. "As in, the guys in suits?"

"The very ones." A.J. ignored the fact that Charlie Eppes' brother hadn't been wearing a suit. Actually, as he recalled, most of the people he'd seen in the FBI headquarters hadn't been wearing business suits. Comfort was far more important to people today than when the Simon brothers had been investigators, and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. A.J. himself took advantage of it while lecturing to students. And in the summer heat, in L.A…

"They're looking into it?"

"They're pretty busy right now," A.J. temporized, casting a glance at Charlie. "They'll be getting to it as soon as they can. Which will be fairly soon," he added reassuringly, getting a confirmatory nod from Charlie. "Charlie has a relative in the Bureau, and we've just gotten back from talking to him." _No need to tell you how brief that conversation was._

"Good, 'cause I've been doing some checking on my end."

"Rick?" The warning antennae sat bolt up right. Cautiously: "Rick, what have you done?"

"Relax, A.J. I just did a little background checking, looking at stuff, that sort of thing. New Zuleika, a tiny little Caribbean island with delusions of being on the world stage, run by thugs masquerading as businessmen, have expertise in international banking as a front for hidden accounts that make the Swiss institutions look like piggy banks. You're getting me out of this scam, right, A.J.?" Rick asked suspiciously. "This is not a good place for my money."

"Rick, you don't have any money in there, remember? I told you that. It's actually someone else's money. They're just using your name as a front. Identity theft, Rick."

"Oh. That's okay, then. I've stopped that."

"Rick?" Cold stabbed A.J. in the gut. "Rick, what did you do? What do you mean, you've stopped it? How, Rick?"

"Relax, A.J." Rick repeated. "I just sent 'em a fax, telling 'em to cease and desist. I sent it to both the New Zuleika bank and to the U.S. brokers that are handling the accounts. Problem solved. It would've been solved a long time ago if you'd told me that I had a fax machine."

A.J. closed his eyes in a heartfelt prayer for patience. "Rick. Do you know who set this whole scheme up?"

"I assume it was just some accountant with delusions of retiring to South America on my money. Or someone else's money, using me as the fall guy."

"No, Rick. It was organized crime."

Silence. Long silence, while Rick Simon digested that piece of information.

"The Mafia? Guys in trench coats, with tommy guns and bad accents?"

"Close enough. I haven't identified the exact group, and I'm not sure that I want to. Why do you think I went to the FBI?" A.J. added in an aggrieved tone. "How often did you and I try to turn things over to government agencies? How often did we consult DownTown Brown _off_ the record, just so the official agencies didn't have to take notice? Rick, you and I _never_ went to the authorities unless we had to." He tried not to watch Charlie's eyes get bigger and bigger, as evidence of A.J.'s involvement in crime-fighting during his early years became more and more clear.

Decision time. Time to cut their losses and run, before their losses included a certain Simon brother buried deep at sea. "Listen, Rick; there's no time to hash this out. Grab Cramer and run, because I am not going to take care of that mutt while you hide. Take him with you."

"He's not a mutt. He's a full-blooded bloodhound, and I paid that breeder good money—"

"I don't care if his mother was pure Pekinese, Rick, just take the damn dog and run! Don't tell me where you are or where you're going. Call in periodically, and I'll tell you when it's safe to come out of hiding. Clear?"

"A.J.—"

"Run, Rick! Right now!"

"Uh, A.J.?"

"What, Rick?" It wasn't going to work. Whatever his brother needed to tell him was taking precedence over simple safety. A.J. wanted to reach through the cell phone and shake the man.

"A.J., there's a black sedan cruising up and down the marina."

Yet another icicle to stab his gut. "Have they seen you?"

"Not yet. They're looking at addresses."

"Can you get out of there without being seen?"

"Not really. Not without jumping over the side of the boat, and I think they'll notice someone splashing around in the water with a wet dog."

"Charlie, call 911." A.J. gestured frantically at Charlie, who pulled out his own cell.

"A.J., wait." Rick was no longer trying to needle his brother. _Serious_ was the name of the game. "The police will never get here in time, and sirens will just push these bozos into something stupid."

"We have to do something, Rick!"

"We will." Rick's voice became further away; the man had apparently pulled away from his phone. "Cramer!" A.J. and Charlie heard in the background. "On guard!"

The next sound that Charlie heard was the tapping of heavy claws against a hard surface; a floor, perhaps.

It only took a moment, and then the baying began. There was no question that Rick's dog was big and well-accustomed to guarding Rick's home. A lighthouse foghorn wouldn't put out as much noise. It was loud, and it was noisy, and it would attract attention from over a mile away. Charlie pitied Rick's neighbors, if they had to put up with this on a regular basis. A.J. hastily turned down the volume on the little cell phone.

It seemed like an eternity before they could finally hear something over the deep-chested baying.

"Cramer! Shut up, you damn mutt! Pipe down already, they're gone. Cramer, heel!"

A.J. restored the volume to average. "Rick?"

"They're gone, A.J., and in about two seconds, so am I. Who the hell were those guys?" Forgetting that they'd just had this discussion less than five heart-stopping minutes ago. "Yes, Cramer, you're a good boy and I will get you a juicy T-bone steak just as soon as we're outta here." Back to the phone. "A.J., take this down: California plates, four alpha foxtrot alpha niner David. That's all I could see of the plates; couldn't get the rest. Got it?"

"Got it." A.J. had pulled a piece of paper and a pen out of his pocket. "Make and model?"

"Ford Taurus, 2006 model, black, white wall tires. Needs a tune up. It stinks of burned gas."

"Got it," A.J. repeated. "Now, Rick, get out of there! They'll be back, and next time they'll have something to deal with Cramer. Never thought I'd appreciate that hound," he confided to Charlie in an aside. "I take back half of all the rotten things I've said about him."

"Only half?"

"Yes, well, he really is a smelly hound that tracks mud inside the house." A.J. turned his attention back to the cell phone. "Rick? You leaving?"

"Yes, A.J., I'm leaving. I'm grabbing a bone for Cramer, and a toothbrush for me, and I'm outta here. Good-bye, A.J. Don't call us; we'll call you first thing tomorrow." The line clicked off.

A.J. breathed a sigh of relief. "That's that. Give Rick five minutes head start, and I defy anyone to find him when he doesn't want to be found."

Charlie nodded. "He's safe, then; I can hold off calling Don in panic mode. Where do we go from here? I can do some tweaking on my equations, figure out where the money is going and where it's been coming from. That should make it easier and faster to follow the money trail, better for the FBI when they can follow up."

A.J. agreed, the forensic accountant following the mathematician exactly. "Perfect. We use your math to increase the probabilities of success in following the correct money chain, while I dig into the most probabilistic chain to determine exactly how it was done and who is doing it. If they grabbed Rick's identity for this one chain, I'm going to bet that they're doing it for others."

"Sucker bet," Charlie told him. "Your place or mine?"

A.J. compared the haphazard mess that he had seen in Charlie's office to his own neatly ordered digs. A.J.'s office was smaller but, due to the lack of detritus scattered around, through, and beyond Charlie's furniture, had more usable space. He suppressed a wince and plastered a false smile onto his face. "Mine."

* * *

At nine o'clock at night, Pacific Time, it was getting tougher and tougher to make headway. All the markets were closed, all the banks were closed, and the criminals that they were after didn't seem to be eager to invest on the Hong Kong stock exchange to take advantage of the alternate time zone. Charlie had no doubt that he could hack into the Federal Reserve to dig out the information that they needed, but there were two problems with that: first there would be unpleasant repercussions from Uncle Sam and two, it would take more time than they could afford. 

A.J. leaned back in his chair, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose to push away the incipient headache that was threatening to come in and wipe out the data stored behind the reading glasses that Dr. Simon had donned. "We're stumped," he admitted. He eyed the remainder of the dinner that they'd had sent in. There were two small and forlorn pieces of sushi left in the small plastic dish, neither of which looked particularly appetizing. The wasabi on the side looked as though it was ready to congeal into the consistency of light green cement. "I don't know where to go from here. I guess we need to wait for your brother to get around to us, so that we can have the resources of the FBI to track these goons down."

"I'm not so certain that we can afford to do that." Charlie was still looking at the screen on his own laptop. He snatched up one of the two pieces of sushi, popping it into his mouth and licking his fingers to clean them before tapping on the keyboard. "Look at this." He swiveled the computer around so that A.J. could see it.

"Hmm. Oh. Yes, I see what you're looking at. Okay, this is not good." A.J. stared at the laptop, wishing that it would come up with an answer on the spot. "There's a high volume, and it happened in the last three hours of the business day. That must have been right after Rick's fax appeared at the broker's, and they realized that their pipeline was cut off. They're trying to cut their losses."

"More than that." Charlie pulled up more data. "Look at this other pipeline that we've identified. Same activity. What are they doing?"

"And this one, too; all showing robust transactions out of the country. Okay, Charlie, this is definitely not good."

"What are they doing?" Charlie repeated. "What does this datastream mean to you?"

A.J. grimaced. "It means that they're running. It means that they know that we've discovered their scheme, and that they're trying to pull everything they can out of their nest before disappearing forever."

"They can't do that," Charlie objected. "If they run now, Don and the others will be too late to catch them." He pulled out his cell. "Look, if I call him right now, maybe he'll be able to spare someone."

"You're going to call him at ten o'clock at night?"

"Better than midnight." Charlie hit the speed dial.

No luck. "The party you are trying to reach is unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message after the tone." Then—"Don, here. You know what to do." Beep.

No help for it. Charlie left a brief message. "Don, it's Charlie. You know that matter that I told you about this afternoon? It's coming to a head right now. When you get this message, call me. Tomorrow morning may be too late to catch them."

He sat back, discouraged. "That's that. Know anything else we can do?"

A.J. too wasn't happy. "LAPD won't be able to handle this; they don't have the resources and certainly not at this hour. This would require identifying the perpetrators with enough certainty to go for a warrant in the middle of the night, and at that hour any judge is going to demand that the identification and the paper trail be _very_ good. No, Charlie, I think we may have lost this round." He peered at the screen again. "Well, maybe not completely. Rick is going to be a very happy camper."

"A.J.?"

One corner of Prof. Simon's mouth quirked upward. "See that number?"

"The 2.3 billion? Yes, I see it. What does it mean?"

Bigger grin. "That my brother Rick is now a billionaire. At least, until we find out who that money really belongs to."

Charlie too developed a smirk. "The money got caught in transit. Our perpetrators put it in, expecting it to go through their pipeline, and then your brother cut off the pipeline with the money still inside. Oh, that's rich! Ouch," he finished up. "That was a bad pun."

"But good for us, and for Rick," A.J. reminded him. "Now, how do we move forward and get these guys?"

They sat there, a long moment of glum silence, trying to figure out how to circumvent the circumstances that had defeated them.

"Tomorrow morning, after we talk to Don, I can use the FBI to access the Federal Reserve d-base and track down more names."

"Which means that I can use that information to dig into another money trail. What can we do until then?"

"Uh…?"

"Exactly." More morose silence, as each man pondered the situation. The sun outside gave it up as a bad deal and sank below the horizon, leaving the L.A. basin awash in a sea of neon lights that barely touched the CalSci campus and impacted the office window not at all.

They continued to think until two masked gunmen burst into Dr. Andrew J. Simon's office.

* * *

A/N: anybody want to take a guess as to who Rick's dog is named after? It's a literary detective. Come visit the forum Calling All Authors! to see other guesses. I'll post the answer when the story's complete. OKB 


	4. Brothers 4

In retrospect, Charlie would be amazed at his colleague's athleticism and presence of mind, especially since the man had several decades of life on Charlie. Charlie himself, he knew, would never be able to react that fast; not unless there was something in his experiment that was about to unexpectedly blow up in his face and take a few students along with him. Filling out the paperwork that would undoubtedly accompany said mishap was enough to make _anyone_ move fast. Charlie's own speed tended to be on a computer keyboard or whizzing through the mind-space of math.

This incident was likely not to generate any paperwork on behalf of CalSci. It would, however, elicit gossip for the next three weeks if not longer by the entire student body and the rest of the staff of CalSci combined. Charlie believed that his own admiration for Prof. Simon would last well into the next decade, assuming that both lived that long. _Big assumption, Prof. Eppes_.

A.J. Simon snatched up a crystal paperweight from his desk and hurled it at the first masked gunman. His aim was good; it caught the man straight across the temple, and the man staggered back like a pole-axed steer.

The second would not be caught by surprise. He aimed his handgun at Prof. Simon.

Prof. Simon was better than any of them realized; that, or simply lucky. The first gunman, already overcome, fell back against the second, and the gunshot went wild. Prof. Simon took advantage of the situation by charging at the pair with a half-ferocious, half-terrified yell. He barreled into them, knocking all three of them down to tumble across the floor.

"Run!" he yelled at Charlie. A.J. scrambled back to his feet and was out through the door before Charlie could realize what was going on.

A shot followed them out from A.J.'s office, burying itself into the frame surrounding someone else's office door. Charlie yelped in terror. It only caused them to run faster, leaping down the stairs faster than a sparrow with a hawk in hot pursuit.

"My car!" A.J. hollered. "Get to it!"

"Mine," Charlie yelled back. "It's closer!"

It was. A.J. had parked his own vehicle—a late model Camaro that looked like it could collect a speeding ticket while still in a parking space with the engine turned off—was at the other end of the parking lot under a spotlight that would all but put a bull's eye on each professor's back. Running across that parking lot would be a wonderful way to allow the gunmen to take careful aim before firing.

Charlie dove into his car, the remote chirping to unlock the passenger door for A.J. He blessed the recent tune up, slamming the car into drive and taking off as fast as the hybrid engine would take them.

It was unfortunate that the first gunman recovered as quickly as he did and was able to follow the others in time to send a bullet to scrape paint off the fender of Charlie's prized and environmentally correct hybrid. It was even more unfortunate, though not surprising, that the gunmen possessed a car capable of out-running Charlie's.

The final outrage was that the gunmen caught up with their quarry just as Charlie was trying to keep his own vehicle on the road and not zoom over a steep cliff.

* * *

Four AM. 

Don turned his cell phone back on. He no longer needed the silence, and it was a good thing that he'd waited. A little icon, accompanied by the typical vibrating buzz, appeared in the window. If that buzz had hit while he was waiting for the suspect to approach, the man would have heard it and bolted and the entire operation would have had to be rescheduled and possibly dumped altogether. The message was probably nothing; if it had waited until four in the morning, it could wait until eight when normal business hours began. Everyone sane was sleeping right now.

Good bust. _Damn_ good bust. Long operation, lots of pieces to tie together, lots of coordination, lots of teamwork on the part of David, Colby, and Megan, along with a number of other field agents that he'd been authorized to pull into this case, and lots of things had gone right. Tomorrow—today, actually—would be filled with paperwork and coffee to keep awake, and an early knock-off time to compensate for the all-nighter that they had all pulled.

He eased himself into his comfortable office chair, blessing the fact that he'd snatched it from Kowalski the day after Kowalski had been promoted to Washington (or demoted, was how Don looked at it, given the position the man aspired to) and that he'd grabbed the chair before anyone else could. His biggest problem now would be to prevent himself from nodding off over the preliminary report.

He inhaled a large quantity of high octane caffeine, savoring the taste, relishing the heat that toasted his esophagus and spread from there to re-energize more of him. Time to get rid of the little icon on his cell. He tapped the appropriate buttons, seeing that the message was from Charlie and that it had been sent around ten last night. He pushed the next button. Might as well get it over with, listen to Charlie's message and then delete it so as not to take up room on the limited memory. He could just bet that it would be something about the financial thing that Charlie had been talking about yesterday afternoon, the one that he'd dragged that other professor in on. What was the other guy's name? Stevens? Samuel? It was some sort of man's name. Simon, that's what it was. Two peas in a pod, that was it. Charlie and that Simon guy had tweaked out one more iota of data from their equations, and wanted to burden Don with it, wanted to turn themselves into The Crime-Stoppers Of CalSci with Don's ever so slight assistance to pick up the alleged perpetrators. Don shook his head in mock annoyance.

He listened to Charlie's voice. "Don, it's Charlie. You know that matter that I told you about this afternoon? It's coming to a head right now. When you get this message, call me. Tomorrow morning may be too late to catch them."

Don looked at his watch once again. Yes, still only five minutes after four in the morning, time when all little FBI agents and all little CalSci professors ought to be in bed, dreaming of the movie star of choice. Don himself had almost decided to camp out in this comfortable chair for a couple of hours until the sun rose until he'd realized that he could tough it out until noon with the reports and then head for home for some serious sack time. Call Charlie at this hour? He snorted; _get real_. If the stuff that Charlie and his friend had come up with was really that fantastic, then there would have been three or four messages from Charlie, all with increasing levels of hysteria. Lack of messages meant that Charlie and his friend had gotten tired and gone home to bed. Chances were good that when eight o'clock arrived, there'd be another call from his brother telling him that they could still track their little perpetrator and arrest him if the FBI hurried and that Charlie would join him at Headquarters after Freshman Calc 101. Financial nonsense versus putting Don's murderer to bed in a little gray cell? Don didn't have a second thought about the decision that he'd made. Murderer first, embezzlement second. At least with embezzlement, people tended not to get killed at a high rate. There was even the possibility that this case wouldn't even make it to the D.A.'s office. Charlie was good, no doubt about that, but he wasn't a trained law enforcement agent and he didn't know the details about what constituted a crime and what didn't.

Don yawned, couldn't stifle it. He gave himself another large swallow of coffee, praying for the caffeine to kick in, and dragged the first of many reports into his visual range.

* * *

His head hurt. 

That was the first thing that Charlie noticed. His head hurt worse than he'd ever known it to, and most of the hurt started on the left side, spiked over to the right, and then wangled its way around in a spiral to encompass his entire brain. He blessed the lack of sunshine around him, because any light that punctured his eyeballs would drill straight into his brain and let it leak out and puddle on the ground.

The second thing that he noticed was that several someones were dragging him out of his wrecked vehicle, and none too gently. They did not have on a rescue worker's uniform. They were not offering words of comfort. They had not come with an ambulance, with sirens, with a police presence to take charge of an accident scene.

They did, however, come equipped with guns that they shoved under his nose.

"Move," one growled, "and you're dead."

Charlie believed him.

* * *

Don stretched wearily, wishing that the clock didn't say a mere ten in the morning, wishing that the sun streaming in through the window had a little more power to tell him that it was daytime and all good little FBI agents were awake and busily working. No, what he really wished was that he'd finished this damn report already so that he could knock off and go to bed. 

He glowered at the empty desk across from his. Megan had gone on auto-pilot and had churned out her version and already submitted it to her team leader. As a reward, she was gone for the day, her report sitting in a little file on his inter-office email, waiting for him to open it, approve it, and forward it on to the area director attached to his own. David too looked like his was almost complete. Colby was still struggling, had opened his thesaurus yet again, and Don had lost count of the times that the younger agent had consulted SpellCheck.

Didn't matter. Don wouldn't be going home until all the reports were in, so that he could review and approve them and then send the batch on to their final resting place. If he was lucky, the D.A.'s office wouldn't appear until after he'd signed out for the day, and they'd have to wait for their own question and answer session until he'd had a minimum of eight hours of sleep. The suspects were safely in custody and the charges had been filed in triplicate. The suspects, Don noted sourly, were already sleeping. Granted, the cell bunks weren't as comfortable as Don's own bed in his own apartment, but that wasn't the point.

He stretched again. "You almost done, Colby?"

"Almost, Don."

_Lie_. The man was as slow as cold molasses running uphill on a rainy Sunday afternoon when it came to writing reports. Don would give him until Don himself was finished with the other pieces, then he'd go hang over Colby's shoulder and goose him along so that he could both hurry the junior agent up and approve the final draft while he was doing it.

In the meantime, Don debated whether to fetch himself another cup of coffee-flavored caffeine or to rid himself of the remnants of the old in the men's room. Both, he decided. More caffeine would keep him awake until his head touched his pillow, hopefully at five minutes past noon, and the trip to the men's room would allow him to douse his head with cold water for an additional pick-me-up.

Another thought struck him: he hadn't heard from Charlie. That was different—he'd fully expected his brother to be calling on the stroke of eight, nine at the latest. Maybe his kid brother had a class to teach? Naw—by ten he'd be finished and calling, even if an early morning class had gotten in the way.

Or maybe Charlie and the other professor had realized that their evidence wasn't as strong as they'd thought. Yeah, that was it. Charlie was a stickler for precision, and chances were that Prof. Simon shared that trait. It seemed to go hand and hand with the Ph.D., at least in the hard sciences. The pair of professors were probably planning a lunch meeting to delve into another theorem that would prove whatever case they were trying to make. Don could expect another call sometimes around one with the results; he resolved to turn off his cell before hitting his own pillow. He'd set up dinner with the two men, and it could wait until then when Don had a full belly of lasagna to fortify him.

He returned to the bullpen with two tall cups of coffee, black. He set one on Colby's desk. "How much longer, Colby?"

"Almost done, Don."

Why Colby had a pencil between his teeth, Don would never know, because all of the writing was being done on a computer keyboard. "Coffee, Colby," he told the man. "Get the lead out. Of your mouth," he added.

Colby groaned. "Bad pun, Don." He put the pencil back on the top of his desk, rescuing it from rolling off the edge. "What's another way to say, 'this guy's ass is in a sling'?"

"You don't need to," Don informed him. "That's the D.A.'s job. And the judge's. And the jury's. Just put down the facts. You know that."

"I've been up all night, and I'm wrecked. I wouldn't know my ass from my elbow if they came around and bit me on the—"

"Faster, Colby," Don interrupted. "Just get it done, so we both can go home."

"Right." Colby poured down a large draught of the coffee. Don winced; there had to be scalded taste buds in there somewhere, screaming for mercy. Didn't matter; getting the report finished did. He retreated to his desk to review both Megan's and David's report while he waited for Colby to conclude his part.

Colby had five more minutes, Don decided after completing his own review. Everyone else was done and had gone home, except for the team leader waiting for the slowpoke. He looked around for something else to keep himself alert while waiting, and remembered his brother once again. He glanced at the clock on the wall that told him that it was approaching eleven. He sighed, re-thinking his former decision to ignore his brother until tonight. Okay, it was time to make nice. It would pay off in the end when he needed something from Charlie, and, bottom line, he hadn't really wanted to put his brother off yesterday afternoon but there were priorities to be set. Charlie understood that. Now that Don had some time—before hitting the sack, dude!—he'd listen to what Charlie and the other professor had to say and then tell them that he'd look into it. Right after taking a well-deserved period of being comatose.

He tapped the speed dial on his cell.

"This is Prof. Eppes. Please leave a brief message, and I'll get back to you."

Don smiled. No long-winded diatribe to listen to. Don could leave the requested brief message and go home with a clear conscience that he'd done his bit. "Hey, Charlie. It's Don. I'm finished with the case that I had yesterday. I'll see you for dinner tonight, and you can tell me about it, okay? See you later."

Lastly: Colby. Don ambled over just as Colby asked the computer for a last SpellCheck. "Done, Don."

"Finally. Send it over, and go home."

"You got it, boss."

Day complete, eleven AM sharp.

* * *

Most of Charlie was cold, but there was one warm edge. It was because, he decided, he was next to another body, one that was equally as motionless as his own. 

Motionless, but not by choice. Not really. Charlie was a great believer in experience as the best teacher, and right now experience was teaching him that any movement would be punishable by excruciating discomfort. Which meant that the ropes that they'd tied around his hands and feet were actually working toward his benefit by not allowing him to indulge in anything more than the occasional deep breath, and he strongly suspected that the warm body lying next to his, that of Dr. A.J. Simon, was in much the same condition.

Voices floated over his head. "Here, this one's waking up."

"Not the one that we want. We want the other one, the blond guy."

"Let's try this."

Charlie tried not to tense. It was A.J. they wanted, not him, but they were both in a great deal of trouble. How had they gotten into this? How could these men have found them? How—

Cold water dashed over his head, cold to the point of freezing. He yelped, hearing another startled cry from A.J. beside him.

Chuckle. "He's awake, too." Someone grabbed Charlie under the arms and dragged him out of the way.

Charlie managed to pry open his eyes, blinking to make the images stop quivering. It didn't look good: there were four men and a woman there in the room with them, and not one of his captors looked to be the type simply to let the pair of CalSci professors leave with an apology for the rough handling. The room itself had little to recommend it, only a bare table and a few hard-back chairs, causing sound to echo cavernously around the immense interior. The two windows both were covered over with boards, allowing little natural light to enter. That didn't matter to their captors. The two overhead fluorescents provided all the illumination they needed.

They slammed A.J. into one of those chairs, the chair rocking back on two legs with the force.

One of the men, the smallest one Charlie noted, stepped forward. "Where's Rick Simon?"

A.J. gave them a vicious smile, and Charlie had to be impressed. It was a performance, he decided, of his FBI brother at his best. A.J. tilted his head. "Sorry. Haven't the foggiest."

_Wham!_ The man backhanded A.J. across the jaw, and the CalSci professor nearly fell off the chair. Only the man behind him, holding him in place, kept A.J. from ending up on the floor. Blood appeared on his lip, and Charlie cringed inside.

"Think harder," the small man advised dryly. He raised his hand for another blow.

"Wait!" A.J. cried out.

The hand halted. "Where is he?"

A.J. tried to make it look good. "Have you tried his boat?"

_Wham!_

More blood appeared, with a bruise on A.J.'s cheek rising swiftly. "I'll take that as a 'yes'," A.J. muttered, the words slurred through his rapidly swelling lips. "Wait!" he yelped, as the hand was raised once more. "His campground! Try where he camps! Up in the mountains! Bear Mountain!"

Once again, the man halted. "Where on Bear Mountain?"

A.J. licked a trickle of blood off his lip. "A campground. Not too far outside of Doble."

The small man considered. "That is possible," he conceded. He gestured to the other three men. "Make sure."

"What?" The look of terror on A.J.'s face was real. "Hey, I gave you—"

The men moved in, and Charlie lost sight of his colleague underneath the mass of muscle. What he heard was frightening enough: punches, followed by grunts, as they systematically beat the former detective.

They finally dropped him to the cold cement floor. A.J. lay there, gasping for breath, trying not to whimper.

The small man stood over him, looking down with an expressionless face. "Just the beginning, Dr. Simon. We intend to find your brother. Whether you are still living after we do so is entirely dependent upon how cooperative you are. Now: are you still certain that your brother is hiding near Doble?"

It took several moments before A.J. could force an answer out. "I don't know where he is," he pleaded, the words muffled through blood. "The campground is where he usually goes when he's not at the boat. He's there!" A.J. yelled, terrified, before the man could kick him. "He's there! He's there!"

The small man drew back his foot. "If he is not, you will regret it," he promised. He gestured to the others. "Let's go. Make sure that the bonds are tight, and then we'll leave. Go ahead and yell," he invited Charlie in an aside. "There's no one around to hear you." He led them outside. Charlie listened, and heard the soft grumble of an engine starting up and pulling out.

He wasted no time inching his way over to A.J., his own bruises forgotten. "A.J.! Are you all right?"

"Stupid question," A.J. groaned, rolling over, the ropes pulling on his arms. "God, that hurt!" He spat, a wad of blood pooling on the floor. "I'd forgotten how much that could hurt."

"You've been through this before?" Charlie was appalled.

Even through the swelling, A.J. forced his lips into a grotesque parody of a smile. "You don't want to know." He tried to snort derisively, and ignored the weakness of the gesture. "Amateurs."

"Amateurs?" Charlie sounded doubtful.

"Well…maybe not. But this was just the softening up stage. I've bought us some time. Let's use it," A.J. instructed. "How are your fingers?"

"Sore." Charlie scooted around so that his back was next to A.J.'s, and his hands able to reach A.J.'s bonds. "I'm not sure I can do this."

"I'm really hoping that you can," A.J. told him, "or that time I bought us is going to seem awfully short, and I'm pretty sure that at least two of my fingers are broken and not going to be of much help for getting us loose. You wouldn't happen to have a penknife on you?"

"No."

"Figures." A.J. muttered something under his breath, something that sounded suspiciously like an aspersion on the habits of kids today. "Well, like the guy on that designer show says: make it work."


	5. Brothers 5

A/N: this chapter contains graphic violence, unsuitable for children, people with weak stomachs, and just about every sane person on this planet. You are warned!

* * *

The alarm buzzed, five PM in the afternoon, and Don seriously debated bagging the whole thing and going back to bed until the next morning. He sighed; doing that would end up with him waking up at four in the morning and then having nothing that he really wanted to accomplish until it was time to get ready for the next day of work. It was always that way when he pulled an all-nighter and had to cope with the after-effects. 

Well, he knew the best way to do that, too: a shower. Something hot and steamy, where he could half-sleep until the sheer force of the heat allowed him to remember that consciousness was not just a theory.

Something scented tickled his nose before he even realized that he was being pelted by the water droplets coming out of the expensive high end shower head that Charlie had gotten him for his last birthday. Patchouli, was that the scent? Sandalwood? It was something manly, that was for certain. It was from that last girl that he'd dated, some quick fling that was over before he had a chance to show her how devoted he could be to his job. Good taste in soap, good taste in men; she'd dumped him fast in favor of someone with a lot more money and discretionary time to spend on her. Couldn't blame the girl. Don hadn't even had a chance to let his father or Charlie know that he was seeing someone new, not that a couple of dates qualified as 'seeing'.

Damn; fingers getting wrinkled. Had he been in the shower this long? Must have fallen asleep standing up. Don applied soap to parts of himself, rubbing it in, wondering if he should shave or if he wanted to try the grungy look that Charlie was adopting these days. Nah; it wasn't as though he was working vice. The position he had needed a more clean cut look, something where he could walk into a boardroom if he needed to and not get dismissed as a wandering low life.

He rinsed himself off and stumbled out of the shower, feeling more awake.

Lasagna next.

* * *

"Isn't there some way to get these ropes untied? Cop shows make it look so easy." 

"I wish. They also solve cases in forty seven minutes, not counting commercial interruptions."

* * *

Don pushed open the door to his old home. He'd had the key for years; this place was still home. His apartment was where he hung his hat, where his clothes lived, and where there was a refrigerator with a six-pack of beer, but this was home. This was where his memories were, and this was where he turned when things were getting ready to get flushed. He sniffed, and paused. Where was the smell of his father's lasagna? Don had promised Charlie and that Prof. Simon that he'd meet with them over lasagna tonight so that they could talk over that investment fraud scheme that they'd uncovered. He felt better after six solid hours of sleep; could have used more, but six was plenty and if he'd tried for more then he wouldn't have able to go to sleep tonight and that would throw him off schedule for the rest of the week. 

He sniffed again, and listened. The place sounded strangely empty, until he heard a small noise in the back. He wandered through to the backyard and found his father grubbing in the dirt.

"Hey, Dad."

"Don." His father looked up with a grin. "You stopped by. Good to see you. Want to grab a set of gloves and help? These roots are not coming out."

Did he _want_ to? No. Was he going to? Absolutely. Don knew better than to try to slip away from his father. Sure, it would work once but he'd be certain to pay for it the next time he needed something from his old man. Don grabbed another pair of work gloves, sliding them over his fingers, wishing that they were a smitch bigger. "Getting rid of this bush?"

"Summer-killed," Alan clarified. "I tried watering it every few days, and it still wasn't enough. I think the garden center sold me a lemon."

"Dad, I'm pretty sure this was an azalea, not a lemon tree." Don kept a straight face.

"Ha, ha. Funny boy. So brings you by, funny guy?"

"What, I can't stop by to say hello?" Don asked. "Where's Charlie?"

"Ah, now the truth comes out. He's not here, Don. Have you tried at his office? Grab this branch. When I say three, pull. Three."

Don pulled. The offending dead bush, faced with the wrath of two adult men, let loose of its hold on the dirt below and came flying out of the ground. Both Don and his father ended up on their backsides on the ground.

Alan looked at Don. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it." Don crawled to his feet, debating brushing himself off and decided against it until the bush was safely in the dumpster. "Charlie's not here?"

"Isn't that what I just said? I haven't seen him all day. For that matter," and Alan paused for thought, "I don't think he came home last night. I just assumed that he'd gotten involved in some sort of problem. It's happened before. More than once, actually."

"It's happened again," Don said, "but from what Charlie said yesterday, I'd thought that he'd come up against a lack of information. I thought he needed more data in order to solve whatever he's gotten himself into. We were going to talk about it over diner tonight. He didn't ask you to make lasagna for tonight?"

Alan shook his head. "Like I said, I haven't seen him since yesterday morning." He frowned. "You think he's okay?"

"No reason why he shouldn't be. After all, he's a professor of math, not an FBI agent." Still, Don couldn't help wondering, couldn't help that little nagging worry. "We can always order out for pizza." He pulled out his cell.

"Again?" his father complained, but his attention was on Don's call.

The call switched right over to Charlie's voicemail. Don left a message, and regarded the screen. "He's got to be somewhere. Let me try Amita." He pushed the buttons. "Amita? Don. Listen, is Charlie with you? I'm looking for him." Pause. "No, there's no case. He came around yesterday with another professor, looking for some help. I'm free now, and I'm looking him up." Pause. "A guy named Simon, a professor in accounting." Pause. "Yes, that's him. Blond guy, in his sixties, maybe, but still active. You'll call him? Thanks, Amita. I'm going to try Larry." He ended the call. "No luck there."

"I'd gathered that," his father said dryly. "Larry?"

"Next." Don blessed the fact that those numbers were already in speed dial. Remembering them would not have worked. His brain didn't have the same affinity for numbers as his brother's. "Hey, Larry, Don here. Listen, is Charlie with you?" Pause for long-winded reply. "Uh, no, that's okay, Megan. Sorry to have bothered you. Bye." He hung up quickly.

"Don, your face is red."

"Yeah." Don swallowed, to give himself a moment. "Let's just say that Larry was busy."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, and I heard a giggle in the background. And then Megan came on."

"Oh. Okay. Not going there," his father agreed. "So, where's Charlie? How long has it been since anyone's seen them?"

"Yesterday afternoon," Don said, becoming grim. "More than twenty four hours. Which makes it not just a puzzle, but an alarming puzzle. Hey, that's Amita calling back." He flipped open the cell. "You found him?" Pause. "No?" Another pause. "Simon, too? Amita, you're telling me that this Simon guy's car is still in the lot, but Charlie's car is missing? Could they have gone somewhere together?" Pause. "Amita, slow down! What are you telling me? Are you saying that some students saw Charlie pull out of the parking lot in that hybrid golf-cart of a car last night, with someone after him? Why the hell didn't somebody report it? Never mind; listen, I want you to stay by the phone, in case Charlie calls. Hang onto those students; we'll be questioning them. I'm going to start the ball rolling from this end. I'm going to call in my team, and we're going to head to Charlie's office to investigate. Oh, and Amita?" Last pause of the call. "Would you call Larry, and let him know, just in case Charlie calls him? Thanks. I'll keep you posted."

* * *

"This is not working." Charlie was striving to keep his fear under control. He was succeeding better at that than with the ropes around A.J.'s wrists. It had been several hours, and they were no closer to freedom than when they'd started. "Don't _you_ have a penknife?" 

"Yes, but they grabbed it away from me early on. You were still passed out on the floor when they took it."

"There has to be a better option."

"If you have one, I'm listening."

Charlie cast around the room. There was nothing, only the bare table and a few chairs, and Charlie sincerely doubted that the dust bunnies would be of any use. "How much longer until they come back? I'm assuming that they won't find your brother in Doble."

"I'd be very surprised if they did," A.J. assured him. "That's why I told them Doble. It's a favorite hang out for him, so that's a place that he will be sure to avoid."

"Do you think he'll miss you soon?"

"I certainly hope so."

"How much longer do you think we have until they come back?"

"I'm going to estimate less than three minutes."

"How do you come up with that?"

"Because I hear a car engine outside."

* * *

Don glanced down at the note in his hand: Business building, room six twelve. At seven in the evening, the place was deserted. Don had only seen a housekeeper type on the first floor, swirling a mop over the entryway, soaking down the dust that had trekked in. He wanted to avoid using the elevator, to avoid alerting anyone that someone was coming, so he'd trotted his way up the five flights of stairs, consoling himself that tomorrow's work out was already accounted for with this activity. 

He paused as he came to the door to the office. The plastic legend was neatly slipped into the slot beside the door, proclaiming this the office of Dr. Andrew J. Simon, Ph.D. It was the one that he wanted.

Still Don paused, and went on alert. There was someone inside. He didn't know how he knew it, hadn't heard anything, hadn't seen anything, hadn't even smelled anything, but he knew it just the same.

Options: call for back up. Not good: whoever was inside would hear the call. It would be impossible to avoid in this complete silence. Next possibility: walk on past, as if going past the office and to the other end where he could call in relative safety. Equally as poor: his quarry would escape with Don too far away to prevent it.

No help for it. Don would have to be on his guard. With luck, the person inside wouldn't realize that Don was moving in on him until Don had his handgun trained right between his eyes. It should work; no one was supposed to be here this late. Everything was closed down for the night, and there was no reason to believe that the person inside even knew that Don was here.

The door was unlocked, and open. Don slid the door wider, allowing himself to slip in sideways, his gun in his hand, blessing the silence of the door hinges.

This office looked to be the complete opposite of his brother's. Where Charlie usually had piles of toppled over papers and several bookcases overflowing with books, Prof. Simon kept his office neat and tidy almost to a fault. The laptop was positioned on one corner of the desk, a small desk lamp correctly placed in order to provide efficient illumination of the screen. There was an inbox, but it was empty. Either Prof. Simon had already disposed of the contents of the inbox, or someone else had absconded with them. Given the appearance of the room, Don was betting on the former.

No one was inside. Had Don made a mistake? It had happened before, and Don was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would happen again. He paused, listening. Nothing. He advanced.

Someone with strength slammed Don up against the wall, one hand pounding the handgun against the cinderblock wall and the other dragging Don's arm up behind his back in a very efficient half-Nelson.

"Drop it before I break your arm," a grim voice growled into his ear. The fingers around Don's wrist with the gun tightened.

_See the stupid FBI agent break protocol by investigating without a partner. See the stupid FBI agent pay for his mistake with his life_. Don tried one more thing. "Federal agent," he ground out. "Don't make this any worse than it is."

"Heard that one before, buddy," the voice told him. "Drop the gun, or you won't be able to hold anything in that hand for six to eight weeks."

"There's ID in my coat pocket," Don insisted. "FBI, buddy, and you are in big trouble."

His assailant considered. "For real?"

"Check my ID," Don invited. "L.A. office. On the force for about ten years." _Which means that I should have known better than to let myself get into this position. Stupid, Eppes. Stupid_.

The pressure on his arm eased up, the hand sliding around to pull Don's ID badge out of his pocket. "Well, I'll be damned," the voice said with a healthy dose of dismay. The man let go of Don, allowing him to turn around. He flicked on the overhead light, and Don stifled a sigh of relief.

Don's assailant was in his sixties, but fit for all of that. The body was lean and the hair, what was left of it, was graying, but there was no lack of intelligence in those eyes. Clearly comfortable in jeans and a plaid shirt, the man moved with the quickness of a rattler—and was probably as dangerous as one. He handed the ID back to Don. "Rick Simon. This is my brother's office. Care to tell me what you're doing in my brother's office after hours and in the dark, Special Agent Eppes?"

"You first." Don put away both his ID and his gun, feeling justified in doing so. If this Rick Simon had wanted him dead, there would have been a dead FBI agent on the floor.

"I'm looking for my brother," Rick told him. "He's missing."

It wasn't hard to put the picture together. "You said Simon, right?"

"That's right. Where's my brother? You arrest him, maybe?"

"I wish." Don came to a decision. "I think it's time to trade stories, Mr. Simon."

* * *

All five of their captors came in, bringing a swirl of fresh and dusty air in with them. It didn't matter; the ropes were still tight around the captives' wrists and the skin underneath abraded and leaking slippery blood from their efforts to free themselves. No one was happy. Not the captors, nor the captives. 

The smaller man marched up to A.J. "He wasn't there." Behind him, Charlie could see the others bringing in equipment: more ropes, a car battery, and things that Charlie didn't want to know the purpose for. It looked like A.J. was in serious trouble, Charlie thought. That equipment looked like their captors meant business.

A.J. didn't have to pretend to be afraid. "I don't know where he is, and if I don't know then I can't tell you."

"Why do I not believe you?" the smaller man said, almost amicably. "Joe, Amos, get to work."

The two men ambled over to Charlie, not A.J. The woman continued to arrange the equipment on the table to her liking, attaching a pair of wires to the car battery.

"What are you doing?" Charlie struggled, surprised when the two grabbed him by the arms and hoisted him to his feet.

"Leave him out of this," A.J. demanded, the words slurred through battered lips. He understood immediately what was going on. "He doesn't know anything! He doesn't know where my brother is!"

"But I'm fairly certain that you do," the smaller man said peacefully. "And you will tell us, in good time."

"Look, there's a bar in San Diego; it's called The Dive. Rick goes there. He might be hanging out there—"

"Use that rafter there," the smaller man directed, ignoring A.J. "That's it, arms over his head. I want him dangling just a few inches off the floor, right in front of Prof. Simon. In fact, here, Prof. Simon, let me help you to this chair. I want you to be comfortable for this. You need to be able to see every detail."

"What are you doing?" A.J. yelled. "Leave him alone—"

"Chair, professor." The smaller man feigned solicitude, shoving A.J. onto the hard-back chair where he could see what the two men were doing to Charlie.

Joe hauled on a rope that he'd tossed over the tall rafter, pulling Charlie's arms up into the air and over his head. Charlie yelped in terror as all of his weight went onto his shoulders, the rope lifting him up and off of his toes. He squirmed around, trying to keep his balance, twisting in the air.

"Hold onto him, Joe," the smaller man directed. "This will be a tricky procedure to do correctly, and we do want to do it correctly, don't we, Prof. Simon?"

"Let him down! It's me you want, not him—"

"Amos, put a gag in Prof. Eppes' mouth, something for him to bite down on. This will probably hurt a lot, and we don't want him biting his tongue and bleeding to death before his time. That would rather ruin the effect."

What were they doing? Shaking with fear had become a reality; Charlie was trembling, dangling and twisting at the end of the rope. Amos shoved a thick wad of cloth into his mouth, tying the ends behind Charlie's head when he tried to spit it out.

The smaller man continued to concentrate on A.J. "Dr. Simon, we want our money back, and the only way to get it is for your brother to sign it over to us. In order for that to happen, we need to find him." He paused to check on his people. "Yes, Darlese, you can begin now. Just make certain that he doesn't bleed to death too quickly." He turned back to A.J. "Up until now, there has been no advantage for you to tell us the truth as to where your brother is. You sent us on a wild goose chase, Dr. Simon, to that campground. You knew very well that he wasn't there."

"I didn't." A.J.'s attention was entirely on the tableau taking place in front of him. Darlese had picked up a wickedly sharp looking knife, and had finished attaching a steel wand to the car battery with wires. "Don't do this. I don't know where he is. You have to believe me."

Struggling didn't help; Joe grabbed Charlie around the hips, stabilizing him four inches off the floor. Amos pulled Charlie's shirt apart, exposing pale skin. Darlese pulled the table closer to them with the battery and the rest of her equipment sitting serenely on top of it. She tested the wand against the knife on the table, the metal glinting fiercely in the light from the overhead fluorescents; ozone sizzled. She set the wand down, and picked up the knife.

"I need to give you an incentive to cooperate, Dr. Simon," the smaller man continued.

The knife slipped into flesh, slicing a long incision. The pain caught up with him a moment later, and Charlie screamed into the gag.

"Stop it!" A.J. begged. "Please! I really don't know where he is!"

Darlene took the wand and stuck it into the wound. The smell of burnt flesh permeated the air, and blood stopped flowing from the cauterized blood vessels. Charlie thrashed frantically, trying to escape, his shrieks muffled by the cloth.

"I might be inclined to believe you, except for one thing: this is your brother. I'm not certain that you'd sacrifice him for a mere colleague."

One last scream, one last twist, and Charlie went still.

Amos peeled back the eyelids. "He's out cold."

A.J. ground his teeth. "You bastard. You filthy—"

"We haven't even begun to persuade you, Prof. Simon," the smaller man cut in. "Darlese, finish up. It doesn't matter that he's unconscious."

"What is she doing?" A.J. demanded suspiciously, watching the woman's every move.

The smaller man moved out of the way, making certain that A.J. would be able to see every detail. Darlese picked up the knife again and widened the incision, using the wand yet again to cauterize the bleeding tissue. She drew out a loop of something red and shiny, letting it hang there. A.J. drew in his breath in horror.

"Yes, I see that you recognize it, Prof. Simon," the smaller man said. "That is a piece of Prof. Eppes' bowel, open and exposed. It would be quite painful, if he were awake to experience this."

"Why are you doing this?" A.J. was horrified. "He doesn't have anything to do with this. Let him go!"

The smaller man glanced at his watch. "I estimate that he will have only an hour or two before infection sets in, and perhaps a few hours more before it kills him. Unless, of course, he bleeds to death, which is also a possibility when he awakens in excruciating pain." His voice hardened. "Why am I doing this? I am giving you an incentive, Prof. Simon, to tell us where your brother is. The alternative is to watch your colleague die, screaming in agony."


	6. Brothers 6

"Crap." Don rarely cursed, and almost never in front of guests. This situation, however, seemed to call for it.

"Don?" Colby looked up, prodding his team leader into more explanation. The others looked at him as well, both David and Prof. Simon's brother Rick. "You got something?"

"I've got something," Don confirmed. "The man behind this money laundering scheme? Rico Araganian."

"_The_ Rico Araganian?" David's voice sounded strangled. "The Rico Araganian who took New York by storm and then vanished, leaving an entire network of crime that the New York office still hasn't unraveled in the past two years? _That_ Rico Araganian?"

"The one and same," Don told him dourly. "That partial license plate that you saw, Rick, is registered to one of his holding companies. It fits with the make and model, even though it was a partial. Araganian is now found, more or less, and we can tie him to this case and to a kidnapping."

"Less, I'm thinking," was Colby's contribution from the computer screen. "Don, this address we have in the DMV database is a fake. We still haven't found him."

"And we haven't found my brother, and yours," Rick Simon put in. "Can we concentrate on that angle? This Araganian character is all fine, but if we can't find my brother—"

"Find Araganian, and we'll have a good lead on both our brothers," Don said firmly, squashing his own fear in favor of solid investigative technique. "What have we got, people? And where is Megan?"

"Right here." Megan tossed her handbag onto her desk and pulled a pair of sensible shoes out of the drawer, exchanging them for her high-heeled pumps. The short black skirt she could do nothing about, and it would be a toss up for any perp she arrested as to whether to look at her gun or her cleavage.

"Megan, I'm sorry about your date—"

"So am I, Don, but this is more important and we all know it." Megan carefully left out who the 'we' referred to, and Don wondered if Larry had wanted to accompany her to FBI headquarters. There really wasn't anything that the physicist could do, not this time, and he'd had the same conversation with both Amita and his father. She turned to Rick Simon and stuck out her hand. "Megan Reeves."

"Rick Simon," Rick responded automatically, eyeing her with a certain amount of doubt. "FBI's changed some since my time."

"You've got that right," Don said. "We've gone high tech."

"Not what I meant, Eppes."

_If you think I'm going to make a sexist comment with Reeves in the room, you've got another think coming, Simon. She can kick your butt and come after me for leftovers_. Don got down to business. "What have we got? We don't have time for pretty, folks."

"We've got a name and no address," David mused. "We need a lead, something to take us to him."

"I've still got the computers looking," Colby said. "They haven't come up with anything. Everything they're spitting out is halfway across the country."

"Even if Araganian does have another address across the country, he's not there now. There won't have been time to take Charlie and Prof. Simon there. They have to be somewhere in the vicinity of Los Angeles."

Rick shuddered.

"What?" Megan noticed.

"Can't get used to A.J. being a professor at some rinky-dink school. This is my kid brother we're talking about, the one I used to pound on growing up."

"I know the feeling," Don told him, "although I don't think they'd call CalSci rinky-dink."

"Whatever. Not helping. Where are we gonna look?"

It hit Don. "We can't find them."

"No shit, Sherlock," Rick said sourly. "You sure you're FBI?"

"If we can't find them, we have to make them come to us. What do they want?"

It clicked.

Rick nodded slowly. "You're right, Don. They want me. They're gonna want me to sign over my life to them, pull those funds out of my accounts where they stashed them and send them somewhere that nobody else can get to them."

"How do we do that?" Colby wanted to know. "I mean, we can't just parade Mr. Simon here in front of everyone downtown."

"Call me Rick, son."

"Yes, sir." Colby was having a hard time of it. Rick Simon was old enough to be his father, and Colby had been raised right. "And if Araganian grabs Mr. Simon—Rick—then he's a dead man, right after he signs a power of attorney paper."

"Cell phones." Don already was putting his plan out. "Rick calls Dr. Simon's cell phone, which Araganian's people presumably have. They set up a meet. We surround and conquer."

"Good idea," David approved. "Rick, you up for this?"

"Anything," Rick agreed. "Where's the phone, and what's the number?"

"What's the number?" Don repeated, puzzled. "Don't you have your brother's number programmed into your cell phone?"

"Agent Eppes, I don't _got _a cell phone," Rick said with a blatant disregard for the niceties of grammar. "What would I want with one of them things?"

More time wasted. "Are you telling me that you never call your brother on his cell?" Don really didn't want this to happen. A glitch in the plan was never fun.

"Sure, I call him. I've called him plenty of times. But I call him from home where the phone actually works most of the time, and the number is posted over my desk, over that printer which he just told me is actually a fax," Rick said, aggrieved.

No time for this. "David?"

"On it." David picked up his own desk phone. "This is Special Agent David Sinclair, FBI. I need the phone number of Dr…." he paused, hunting for the first name.

"Andrew Jackson Simon," Rick put in. "Mom was always a sucker for history."

"Thank you." David jotted it down on paper and pushed it toward Rick.

"My turn." Rick picked up the handset to the phone on Don's desk.

Don halted him. "Wait a minute. Colby?"

Colby turned away from the computer, anticipating what was coming up. "The trace is ready to go, Don. Mr. Simon—"

"Rick."

"—Rick, keep 'em talking for as long as you can. We're gonna see which towers get used, see if we can triangulate the signal. Charlie used something like this a while ago to help us find—"

"Don't tell me how it works, son. You'll only confuse me. How long you need me to talk to this guy?"

"As long as you can, sir."

"Fine." Rick turned back to Don. "You ready?"

"Hit it."

Rick dialed.

"Hello, you've reached Dr. Simon," said A.J.'s voice. "Please leave a message."

* * *

Acute misery forced him to wake up, and Charlie thoroughly wished that it hadn't. 

He felt hot; he felt cold. His wrists burned, his shoulders ached, and there was a killer stitch in his gut that he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy, Marshall Penfield not excluded. He licked his lips; that was not the least of his woes but at least the gag was gone.

Numbers floated through his mind in dictatorial progressions, forcing him to calculate them over and over like an irritating melody that wouldn't leave his brain. He was so tired of inserting pi into the quadratic equation _there_ instead of finally solving the damn thing and moving on. It wouldn't stop; over and over and over until Charlie wanted to scream in frustration.

"Charlie? Charlie, say something. Charlie?"

It penetrated. Someone was trying to talk to him. Someone was moaning too, in the background, and it was distracting him from trying to deal with the pain.

"Charlie? Oh, god, Charlie, I'm so sorry I got you into this!"

Charlie licked his lips again. There didn't seem to be enough spit to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth, but he tried anyway, closing his eyes to concentrate. "A.J."

"Charlie! You're awake!"

The moaning, Charlie discovered, belonged to him. He opened his eyes again, and it seemed to help. The moaning stopped.

"Charlie, I swear I'll get us out of this somehow! Just hang in there! Don't die on me, Charlie!"

_Like I have any say in the matter_. Blackness wavered at the edges of his vision, and he gratefully surrendered to its silent embrace.

* * *

"All right, big FBI man, what do we do now?" Fear made Rick Simon angry. "What bar do you want me to parade my ugly mug in, hoping that it's the right one? How are we gonna get hold of this Araganian guy?" 

"Slow down, Rick." Don concentrated on the problem. "Let's think this through. We're going on the assumption that Araganian has your brother and mine."

"No brainer, Eppes."

"A phone number comes through on Dr. Simon's phone, one that isn't recognized by the cell as belonging to you." Don refused to be distracted. "If I'm Araganian, what do I do? Megan?"

The profiler took over. "I wait. This is Prof. Simon's cell, and there is a good chance that students call him, even at nine in the evening. I don't want anyone to know what's going on, so I wait for voicemail to get it. I don't want to give Prof. Simon an opportunity to get a message through to the FBI through the students. I wait," she repeated, "and I'll have Prof. Simon access his voicemail so that I can see if it's from Rick or not."

Rick got it. "He thinks that I'm going to wait five minutes, and call back. He knows that A.J. doesn't have my number, because I'm moving around from one place to another. He knows that he has to make me come to him."

"And he doesn't know," David added, "that you know that he has A.J. He may think that you're assuming that A.J. is teaching class right now."

"Guy, it's summer."

"CalSci teaches class in the summer."

"Summer school for dummies?"

"Not really. Try the rich moms and dads who can afford to get Junior through faster before heading off to medical school."

"Oh. So you ready now for me to make another call, or do you want keep on jabbering for a while?"

Don indicated the phone. "If no one picks up, leave a message. Tell him that you'll call him in an hour. That will give Araganian a timeline to shoot for. That will give us time to get ready."

* * *

No more twisting at the end of a rope. Exhaustion prevented that, and the involuntary tremors that were shaking every part of Charlie supplied all the movement that A.J.'s fellow professor was capable of performing. There was a slow and steady oozing of blood from the man's waist, a trail that was leaking onto his pants and staining them dark. A. J. wanted to scream with frustration, anything to save the man from what lay ahead. 

"Charlie?" The man still had to be alive. A dead body wouldn't be shaking like that. A dead body wouldn't have shallow breaths still seeping in and out of his lungs, little whimpers of distress on every puff of air. "Charlie?"

"What?" It finally penetrated, and A.J. breathed a sigh of relief. There was still a working brain inside that curly dark head.

"You're awake," he offered.

Charlie blinked a couple of times before he identified the speaker as A.J. "Not by choice," he whispered honestly.

"Listen, I need you to hang on," A.J. told him. "I'm making some progress with these ropes. There's a splinter on the back of this chair, and I think I may be able to cut through the ropes and get us out of here," he lied. He moved his arms up and down, trying to rub the bindings against the hard wood, feeling a couple of ribs grate painfully against themselves, pretending that he was severing the ropes. A.J. ignored the discomfort; Charlie had it a lot worse on this round. "I'm hoping that it won't take too much longer."

"Good." Charlie closed his mouth after saying that. There was a lot of groaning that had slipped out without permission, A.J. noted, cringing. _Charlie wouldn't be here if it weren't for me. I got him into this, me thinking that I'm still this great detective. Hah—Rick and I never got the agency beyond the Mom and Pop size stage, and then we folded. How great was that? Now Charles Eppes, math genius extraordinaire, is going to pay for my mistake. Screwed up big time, Simon_. _What're you going to do for an encore?_

Charlie tried to summon his fleeting strength. "How long have we been here?"

"Not sure. A few hours, I think." _Keep it vague, A.J. Don't let the kid lose his will to live_. _Keep him going until Rick finds us, because I know that he's looking by now. I know my brother_.

"You really think you can get us out of there? The ropes are getting looser?"

A.J. forced a grin. It was useless on two counts: first, his swollen lips turned the expression into a ghastly parody of itself and second, Charlie's vision wouldn't reach that far. "Would I lie to you at a time like this?"

"Yes." _There's no way for anyone to find us. Not Don, not the rest of the FBI team, not your brother. You're simply trying to keep me alive on the million to one chance that they'll be lucky. This hurts, dammit, and you're putting me through more_. A.J. could hear the thoughts in Charlie's head as if the man had said them out loud.

"Well, I'm not. I'm making progress—" he broke off.

The smaller man entered, followed by the others. Darlese's gaze zoomed immediately to her victim; she licked her lips. A.J. tried not to shudder; the smaller man would see it, and would know what it meant. It meant one more tool to use against A.J., to get Rick to come here to his death.

_Lose-lose situation. Was there any way this could get worse?_

Of course there was. The smaller man held up a cell phone. A.J. recognized it as the same model as his and, considering the little picture in the window that looked extremely familiar, had a strong suspicion that it did indeed belong to him.

The smaller man seemed to think so. He positioned himself in front of A.J. and held it in front of him, flipping open the top. A small legend popped up: three voice mails.

"Let's see who they're from, shall we?" the smaller man invited.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you that it's rude to open other people's mail?"

_Blam!_ The blow rocked A.J. back in his chair. He was certain that yet another three teeth were loosened.

"Access code," the smaller man demanded.

A.J. blinked, trying to get his wits back under control. It wasn't easy.

The smaller man leaned in close. The odor of a breath mint was there under A.J.'s nose. "Open the voice mail, or I will tell Darlese to start playing with your friend."

Darlese licked her lips again. Naked hunger showed in her eyes.

_Charlie, don't look!_ The math professor's own eyes were thankfully closed; A.J. couldn't tell how much awareness was still left. It didn't matter. If A.J. didn't cooperate, the screaming would start. There was no doubt of that.

"Access code," the smaller man pushed.

A.J. gave in. "One eight six seven."

The smaller man hit the buttons, and the irritatingly calm standardized voice came on. "You have three new messages. First message, sent yesterday, at six forty-five PM." A new voice, young and female, chirped from the phone, "Hi, Prof. Simon, it's Carly O'Hara, from your Accounting 101 course. I don't understand the stuff you presented on chapter sixteen. Can I come by and see you?"

Under normal circumstances, A.J. would have arranged for a chaperone to be present during office hours. The smaller man avoided the problem all together by touching the wrong button. "Message erased. Next unheard message sent today, at seven sixteen PM." This message was from a deeper voice only recently relieved from the bonds of puberty. "Uh, Prof. Simon, this is Matthew, Matthew Clarkshaw. Uh, you're not here for class tonight. Your Accounting II class, I mean. Is class cancelled? We're all here. Should we leave? Uh, I guess we're gonna. Maybe somebody forgot to leave the message for us?"

That message too went the way of the first. It didn't really matter, A.J. decided. Class was long since over, and he was really hoping that he'd be alive for the next session. That possibility wasn't looking too good.

"Next unheard message, sent today, at nine fourteen PM."

Everyone knew who the next voice belonged to. Of the group, only A.J. Simon had heard it before, but that didn't matter.

"A.J., it's Rick. Where are you at, guy? Listen, I got a question for you. I'll call you again in about an hour, okay?"

That message didn't get deleted. The smaller man looked at his watch. "Three after ten. I hope your brother is punctual, Prof. Simon." He gestured to Charlie, still hanging from his arms, blood still trickling down his side. Darlese was at Charlie's side, waiting for permission to move in on him. A.J. felt sick, and swallowed hard.

The phone rang, and vibrated at the same time. The smaller man glanced at the number, and showed it to A.J. "Recognize it, professor? Is it your brother? It's earlier than he said he would call."

"I don't know," A.J. replied honestly.

"Darlese—"

"I really don't know!" A.J. cried out. "Rick doesn't use a cell! He could be calling from anywhere!"

The smaller man held up his hand to halt the woman. "Talk to whoever it is, Prof. Simon, and say the right things. Your colleague's continued well-being depends on it."

"I will." A.J. could feel himself shaking. _Please, please, don't let it be Rick!_

The smaller man opened the call. A.J. coughed, coughed again to clear his throat of terror. "Prof. Simon."

"A.J. Hey, where were you, guy? I've been lookin' all over for you. You weren't at your office."

"I—I know, Rick." A.J. stumbled over the words. Rick sounded calm. He didn't know what was going down, thought he was safe from these hoods. "I've…been around." _You have to get the message. Put it together, Rick! It's not just you that's in trouble here!_

The smaller man saved them both from the effort of telepathy. He put the cell to his own face. "Mr. Simon."

All the good humor faded instantly from Rick Simon's tones across the cell. "Who is this?"

"Unimportant. What _is_ important is that your brother and an acquaintance of his are my guests, and will stay that way until you cooperate."

"If you hurt so much as one hair on his head—"

"I have two of them, Mr. Simon. Neither one is in good condition. I can kill one, and still threaten you with killing the other. Do you understand?"

There was no help for it. A.J. knew that Rick would make no other choice. "What do you want me to do?"

"Don't give in, Rick—" he yelled.

_Blam!_

The rest of the conversation didn't register.

Charlie's scream did.


	7. Brothers 7

David sat in front of the console, punching in the codes, Colby beside him and doing his share. "Almost ready. We'll track the call; see if we can narrow down where the cell phone is by identifying the tower that the call goes through."

"You can tell where my brother is with that thing?" Rick was suspicious. "Tracing phone calls has come a long way since my time."

"Far from perfect, but we try." David's attention remained on the console. "Okay, go ahead. Dial, and keep whoever answers the phone talking as long as you can. If we're lucky, we'll get a complete lock."

"And if we're not?"

"Let's not think about that part." Don steered the older man back to the task. "Dial, and talk."

"You make sure your fancy spy gadgets do what they're supposed to," Rick grumbled, but he picked up the phone. Reaching over and around him, Don put the phone on speaker, so that they all could hear as it happened. Megan settled herself with a pad of paper and a pen, to take down the non-verbal impressions. David touched the recorder.

Five long rings. Then—

Cough. Cough again. "Prof. Simon."

Rick put a deliberately jovial tone into his voice. "A.J. Hey, where were you, guy? I've been lookin' all over for you. You weren't at your office."

David waved his hand at him. _Keep talking_.

"I—I know, Rick." Pause. "I've been around."

There was something definitely wrong with his brother. Rick could smell the fear across the phone line. He looked up at Don, making certain that the FBI types were taking all of this in. Don nodded, letting him know that the message had been received. This was serious.

Another voice, deeper than A.J.'s, cut in. "Mr. Simon."

Game over. Rick froze. "Who is this?"

"Unimportant. What is important is that your brother and an acquaintance of his are my guests, and will stay that way until you cooperate."

"If you hurt so much as one hair on his head—"

"I have two of them, Mr. Simon. Neither one is in good condition. I can kill one, and still threaten you with killing the other. Do you understand?"

Need to keep him talking. Need to keep this call going. "What do you want me to do?"

A.J.'s voice called out frantically from the background. "Don't give in, Rick—"

Everyone in the room heard the blow, heard the grunt that followed. Rick turned white. His fingers clenched on the handset of the phone. "A.J.!"

"Cooperate, Mr. Simon."

Rick took his hand off of the desk, deliberately removing the white knuckles. Trembling would make the drawers rattle, and they needed to hear this phone call clearly. "I'll cooperate. Just don't hurt him. Not him, and not the other guy, or I swear I'll hunt you down and kill—"

"Save the histrionics, Mr. Simon. Come to the northern edge of Fairview Park and wait for me. Do it now. If you do as you are told, all three of you will live. If you cross me in any way…" The voice let the threat trail off, except for one last sound.

It was a shriek of agony. It came from Don's brother.

* * *

Fairview Park looked eerie in the night. A distant street light added to the meager efforts of the stars, and the moon barely deigned to contribute a slender crescent of illumination. Coyotes yipped in the hills behind the park, glorying in the warmth of the summer night, and a pair, more daring than the rest, decided to see if any of the feral cats in the park were in the mood to be exterminated for tonight's dinner. The rats, however, were far too large for any coyote to tackle. 

The man in cowboy hat waited in the designated place, as instructed. There would be no deviation from his orders, not if he wanted Professors Eppes and Simon to see the light of the next day. Again as ordered, he left his pickup truck in the parking lot and advanced to the edge of the grassy knoll, well away from the vehicle and a quick getaway.

A dark sedan rolled to a stop, and a single man emerged. He approached the man in the cowboy hat, looking around to make certain that they were alone. "You Rick Simon?"

"Yes," came the reply. "Where's my brother?"

"Do as you're told, and you'll see him soon enough." The man gestured at his own vehicle. "Get in."

"Where are we going?"

"You don't need to know that."

"Yes, I do. I'm not going anywhere until I see—"

The man pulled out a cell phone. "One call on this, and one of those guys dies." He made sure the message got through, and then gestured sarcastically to the car. "Get in."

The man in the cowboy hat did as he was told.

Once inside, things changed. The other man sat in the driver's seat, but didn't start the car. Instead, he pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them over. With his other hand, he took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it onto the papers, onto the bottom where a line for a signature waited.

"What's this?"

"Sign them."

The man in the cowboy hat demurred. "I ain't signing—"

The other man held up the cell phone.

Angrily. "I'm signing." It was hard to see the papers in the dark. "Power of attorney? What do you need that for?"

"I don't need it. You do, to keep that brother of yours alive." The other man accepted the papers back. He shone the flash onto the signature.

"Okay, I signed the damn thing. Where's my brother?"

"Hold your horses, cowboy." The man continued to look at the signature.

"What do you want from me? I signed it! Where's my brother? Where's Prof. Eppes?"

The other man thrust the papers back against the cowboy's chest. "I don't know who you are, buddy, but you just signed somebody's death warrant. This is not Rick Simon's signature." He pulled out a gun and aimed it at the cowboy's chest. "Who are you? LAPD?

Two more handguns, held by two additional people, materialized at the car windows on either side.

"FBI! Freeze!" Megan snarled at the other man.

David yanked open the car door and pulled the man out. "You are in a hell of a lot of trouble, man."

Colby removed the cowboy hat from his head. "Which means that you'd better start talking, and fast, or your next appointment will be before a judge with the D.A. asking for the death penalty."

* * *

"Over here." Don kept his voice low. "That's Charlie's car." 

It had been crunched and abandoned for a while; bugs and other fast moving vermin had already moved in. The front bumper listed crazily to one side. The back windshield had shattered, the pebbles of glass over the back seat and littering the ground beside the car. The story wasn't difficult to unravel, even in the dark: the car had been forced through the guardrail and down the slope. The occupants—two hapless CalSci professors—had been dragged from inside and carted off long ago.

Not far. Neither one had been taken far, and both were together. Don was betting his brother's life on that supposition, and the evidence from the cell phone call was backing him up. There was no way to pinpoint the exact location of the cell phone, but tracing the call back to the tower it had gone through said that it was in this general vicinity. Finding Charlie's car here, crashed on this slope, gave added weight to the theory.

It was a half-assed plan, but there was no time to come with anything more. Despite his protestations, Don wasn't about to place Rick Simon in a position where Araganian could get what he wanted: a legal signature on some papers saying 'Power of Attorney'. That would be a surefire way to end this case in a hurry with three dead bodies: two Simons and an Eppes. Instead, Colby took his place, banking that none of the kidnappers knew what Rick Simon looked like. Colby, with David and Megan as back up, would meet the kidnappers. None of them believed that the criminals would bring both professors with them; at best, the exchange would result in a single rescue. Good, but not good enough.

So Don took Rick with him, counting on the others to keep the kidnappers busy. With luck, he and Rick and Rick's bloodhound would be able to locate the remaining captive and free him before the deception was discovered.

Don's cell buzzed. He flipped it open. "Eppes."

"Don, David. We got this one, but there was no one with him. Not Charlie, and not Prof. Simon, and this guy's not talking. Megan's doing a fast interrogation, but so far we're not coming up with a location. He's more afraid of Araganian than he is of us."

"Change that attitude," Don instructed, "and change it now. I need that location, David!"

"We're working on it, Don."

"Keep Megan on the suspect; tell the D.A. to give her whatever she needs to get him to spill. You and Colby get out here and back me up. When we find Charlie and Simon, we're going to need to move fast and hard."

"We'll be there ASAP, boss."

Don hung up, refusing to let his hands shake. He needed to focus, and he needed to set his emotions aside in order to do this job. He tried not to glare at the glint of a handgun stuck in Rick's belt. "I hope you have a license to carry that thing. I'm stretching regs enough to even let you be out here."

"I'm hoping you know how to use yours," came Rick's sharp retort, "because I'm stretching my _patience_ going after my brother with this little pea-shooter instead of one of the hunting rifles back home on my boat." He turned to the bloodhound, totally ignoring the fact that it would take him a minimum of three hours to return to his boat in San Diego to fetch the rifle and then return to blow someone's deserving head to bits of broken flesh and bone. The animal stuck its nose into Rick's hand, searching for goodies. "Not now, Cramer. I need you to find A.J. Find A.J.," he urged.

The hound looked at him mournfully.

"Yeah, I know you don't like 'im, but he's my brother. He's the only one I got."

Cramer snuffled at the car, and looked back at Rick.

"We're not talking tomorrow, dog. Git!"

Cramer got. One more snuffle, then a loud bay to indicate that not only did he have the scent, but that he didn't like the owner of the scent and he resented his master's commands to find said person.

_I really hope that Araganian and his people didn't hear that_. Don took off on a run after Rick and his dog.


	8. Brothers 8

A/N: graphic violence alert. There will be another 'moment' in this chapter. Avoid reading this during meals.

* * *

_Three different careers, and all three of them have ended up with me on the wrong end of a loaded gun. How does a college professor wind up staring death in the face?_

It was all going down the toilet, and there wasn't a damn thing that A.J. Simon could do about it. This was supposed to have been a simple forensic accounting assignment for a friend, just make sure that funds of money were staying where they were supposed to.

Rick. This was all Rick's fault. It really wasn't, but it felt better to blame his brother. If Rick's name hadn't shown up as the 'alleged perpetrator' then A.J. wouldn't have realized so quickly that this was an illegal financial scheme using his brother as one of the unwitting participants. Without that realization, A.J. wouldn't have made Charlie go to his FBI brother at the wrong time. They would have been able to turn over the information after another two weeks of exploration, and the FBI would have gratefully accepted the donation with all due haste and gone on to put themselves in danger instead of two overmatched CalSci professors. Yeah, blaming Rick for this mess worked.

The smaller man looked up at him from where he was sitting across from one of his men. The other—Joe, A.J. thought the name was—had already left, presumably to meet Rick and bring him back. The smaller man considered the situation, and spoke. "Amos, make certain that Prof. Simon is secure in that chair. I don't want him interfering."

_As if I could_, A.J. thought wearily to himself. _There's something about broken ribs that has a very distinctive jiggly feeling inside. I recognize that sensation, which says something unpleasant about the life that I've led_.

Amos roused himself to check, tightening the strands that A.J. had loosened earlier. He yanked on the rope, and forced a grunt out of A.J. "All tight, boss."

_Cutting off circulation, too_. A.J. couldn't feel his hands any more, which, given the circumstances, was appreciated. Which would die first? Would his hands turn black, or would they put a bullet through his heart before that happened? Maybe through his head; yes, that would be appreciated. One swift sharp pain, and it would be all over.

Not like Charlie. A.J. felt horribly guilty about what his young colleague was going through. He didn't deserve this. Of course, no one did, but Charlie least of all. All the mathematician had done was to help a CalSci colleague with an interesting intellectual problem. For that little act of kindness he would die, twisting at the end of a rope, infection putting his insides on fire. Not fair. Not fair at all.

As if reading his thoughts, the woman—Darlese—moved to Charlie's side. She stroked Charlie's bare skin across his belly, finger just barely skirting the congealing blood that was oozing out and down onto his pants. Charlie didn't see her with his eyes closed, but he could feel her. He moaned.

"Darlese," the smaller man admonished. "We still need him alive."

The woman's eyes were dilated, huge with an insane hunger. "Just a little." Another soft caress on pale skin. A promise of things to come.

Amos, the one taking orders, turned away, clearly uncomfortable with the appetites of the woman.

"Just a little," she pleaded, her lips parting, on the verge of ecstasy. "Just a little. I won't hurt him."

A.J. sincerely doubted that.

The smaller man looked at his watch, gauging how much time had past and how long before things began to happen once more. "Just a little," he agreed. "No knives."

"No knives," she murmured. "No knives."

She didn't need a knife. She inserted a bare finger into the wound in Charlie's belly that she had made earlier, swiping it around inside, manipulating the contents that never should have been exposed to open air.

It hurt. It hurt, but there was no energy left to cry out. A ragged groan was all that Charlie could manage, a groan that mixed with Darlese's own moan of orgiastic pleasure. Her face flushed; she withdrew her finger and stuck it into her mouth, sucking off the blood that she had retrieved.

Amos dashed to the edge of the room and threw up.

"That's enough for now, Darlese," the smaller man told her, unmoved by her actions. "Sit down." Then he cocked his head. "What was that?"

"What was what?" Amos asked thickly, grateful for something to focus his attention onto, something other than the man being tortured in his presence.

"That noise. It sounded like a dog barking."

_No, it sounded like a hound baying. There was a difference. Little Chihuahua-sized ankle-biters yip, medium-sized terriers bark, and hounds bay_. A.J. Simon knew the difference. He knew it very well after trying to get onto his brother's boat one time when Rick wasn't there. Rick's taxes had gotten filed late that year, with the most amazing 'the dog ate my homework' excuse that A.J. had ever had the misfortune to write down on a tax return. "Maybe it was a wolf, howling at the moon," he suggested helpfully, "or a coyote. There are a lot of them around here."

"It could be," the smaller man agreed, and took out his own handgun. "Or then again, it might not."

_Yeah, that was Cramer outside_. A.J. would know that over-fed howl anywhere, heard it in his nightmares after one too many glasses of tequila. That meant that his brother Rick was outside, because A.J. sincerely doubted that Cramer would come after Andrew Jackson Simon without some heavy duty prodding by his master. There wasn't a T-bone steak that A.J. could offer that mutt that would persuade Cramer to help out Rick's brother.

Problem was, Rick was only one man. A man with a gun and a dog and a mission, but only one man. Rick liked it that way, liked to be on his own. The only back up that Rick ever called for had been DownTown Brown—who was currently retired and bossing around a large proportion of his family. A.J. knew that for a fact because he'd once done 'Town the favor of trying figure out the man's taxes and regretted it thoroughly when he found out how many people were trying to be tax deductions—or A.J. himself, and A.J. was not in any position to offer back up of any sort.

One man against two and a looney-toons woman who would eagerly stick a knife into someone to see them bleed? Not good odds.

Okay, look at this logically. Rick would only be throwing his life away if he tried to interfere. Charlie, if he didn't get some serious medical care soon, was as good as dead. A.J. himself had a good chance of collecting a bullet by accident in the shootout, if it should come down to one. So, realistically, the only one with a decent chance of walking away from this was Rick, no matter what anyone did.

Which made the thought of what to do a whole lot easier, and it went along with A.J.'s sense of what was right in the world. Letting these goons get away with the money that they were scheming to recover left an unpleasant taste in his mouth. Time to do something about it.

"Rick!" he suddenly yelled, ignoring his sore jaw. It wouldn't be sore much longer. After he was dead, he wouldn't feel anything. "Rick, get out of here! There's three of them!"

The smaller man reacted immediately. "Mr. Simon!" he shouted. "Present yourself at once, or I will kill your brother!" He took out his gun, placing it to A.J.'s temple.

Rick's drawl traveled inside through the door, clear and unwelcome. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. You want your money? You need me to cooperate, and I ain't about to do that until I have my brother standing here beside me."

A.J. ground his teeth. "Rick, you idiot! Get out of here before they kill you!"

"Shut up, moron. I'm rescuing you!"

A.J. swore under his breath. "Rick, run!"

Rick did not run. Rick opened the door with a bang. Rick had his gun in his hand. Rick was alone.

He was up against too many. The smaller man held his own gun to A.J.'s head.

"Surrender, Mr. Simon," he said, "or this is the last breath your brother will take." He pulled back on the trigger.

Rick stalled for time, eyes narrowing. "What do you want?"

"Your signature, Mr. Simon. I want you to revoke the financial cut off that you sent to your broker yesterday."

"Banks aren't open right now, least not in this country. In case you hadn't noticed, it's close to midnight."

"I can wait."

"He can't." Rick indicated Prof. Eppes, hanging from ropes, oblivious to what was being discussed. Darlese had sidled close to him once again, waiting her opportunity to slake her thirst. She had picked up, A.J. noticed nervously, the sharp knife that she had used to make the initial wound. The metal gleamed brightly in the dim lights of the large room. Rick continued, "I think you'd better get him down from there." And, just as the smaller man had said mere seconds ago, Rick added, "I can wait. But if too many people start dying, I'll have to rethink my position." He shifted from one foot to the other and repeated, "I can wait."

"I can't," Darlese whispered, putting her hand toward Charlie and then pulling it back, over and over. "I can't." She let the knife slide along Charlie's skin, tracing a lighter line in the half-clotted blood. She licked her lips. "Please, let me have him."

Rick, by himself, wasn't going to be able to get them all out of this. From the look of him Charlie had mere moments left of life, and if A.J. let that woman get hold of him those last moments would be filled with agony.

Better to make it quick. Better to save one life than lose all three. One quick move, that would do it.

This was going to hurt.

Only one thing to do. Only one thing that A.J. Simon could do. All tied up, no hands available to grab a gun. No feet to kick with.

He could knock over the chair that he was tied to. He could knock it over, and throw off the smaller man's aim. He could delay that one gun just long enough for Rick to shoot Amos standing there in the corner and then escape. He could do that.

He did.

A.J. aimed it just right, twisting his head so that the corner of his temple grazed the barrel of the smaller man's gun, sending the bullet careening into the wall to Rick's left. The sound was deafening, loud enough to send A.J.'s vision reeling along with his hearing. The chair crashed over, A.J. carried along with it. He thumped to the floor, and every part of him that had received any injury in the past twenty-four hours let him know in no uncertain terms that they were through kidding around. Agony flared through him. Nausea bubbled up. Consciousness wavered.

* * *

"A.J.!" Rick yelled. No time for squabbling, no time to tell his brother that he just screwed up royally. That was A.J., always getting into trouble so that his big brother had to come and bail him out. Rick dove to one side, sending off one shot toward the toady as he did so, feeling more than seeing the shot from the little guy—he assumed it was Araganian—bury itself in the wall behind where Rick's head used to be.

Which was when Don Eppes stepped from behind the door, hands locked onto his own gun.

"FBI! Freeze!"

Amos yelped; Rick's bullet had buried itself in his shoulder, and he dropped to the floor with a curse.

Darlese screamed. They were going to take away the man that she'd worked so hard on, the wound that she'd done just right! This was her victim, to torment until he died! She'd been promised this man! She screamed again, and raised her knife. One last move—

Don shot her. No chance for a take down. A man's life was at stake. His _brother's_ life was at stake. He shot her before she could reach her victim.

Araganian was made of sterner stuff, and his liberty was in jeopardy. For a man with as much to lose as he, escape was the only option. Still collapsed on the hard cement floor, he put his gun to A.J.'s head. "Hold!" he barked.

Everyone froze. The two other guns, Rick's and Don's, had already snapped into position, locked onto the pair.

No good. Just a half inch off, and CalSci would be minus an accounting professor. The mortician would be parting A.J.'s hair on the other side of his head to cover up the damage.

"Put the gun down," Don warned, sidling to one side, widening the distance between himself and Rick. Less chance of hitting someone that didn't deserve to be shot. "Put it down, and you'll get out of here alive. You're not going anywhere."

"The two of you will back off if you want Prof. Simon to stay alive," Araganian retorted. "You, get back closer to Simon," he warned Don. He crawled back to his knees, still keeping the gun pushing the locks of A.J.'s hair apart. "Here's what going to happen. Amos, you bring me that knife." The woman would never need it again. Her sightless eyes stared blankly at the ceiling, and the blood had already stopped leaking from the bullet hole through her chest. Rick couldn't find it in himself to be sorry.

"I'm shot," Amos complained.

"And you'll be spending ten to twenty behind bars instead of in Mexico if you don't obey me," Araganian said. "Get the knife. Untie Prof. Simon; we can't take him and this chair."

It took too many minutes, but Amos one-handedly released A.J. from his bonds. The man collapsed to the floor, still out cold. Still breathing, though; Rick could see his brother's chest rise and fall ever so slightly. It wasn't much comfort.

Araganian was stronger than his small stature would have indicated. He seized A.J. around the neck with one arm, the other maintaining the gun's close proximity, and dragged his impromptu shield to the door. Both Rick and Don kept their guns trained on the pair, looking for an opportunity to shoot and not daring to. Araganian was being too careful.

"Get the car," Araganian ordered to Amos without looking over his shoulder.

"I'm shot. I can't drive."

"You will if you want to live. Get the car." It was a powerful incentive. Araganian continued to move backward, using A.J.'s limp body as cover. Rick and Don too inched around, trying to get a clear shot and knowing that it wasn't happening. Still…

"I thought you said that your guys would get here any minute," Rick growled under his breath to Don.

"I did." Don was equally unhappy. "Nobody said which minute."

"It better be fast. We got your brother back; Araganian's leaving him behind. Mine's still in trouble."

"I'm open to suggestions."

"I got better than wimpy suggestions. I got solutions."

"What?" Don asked suspiciously. "What have you got in mind?"

Araganian was almost to the car with A.J., still backing away and dragging the unconscious figure. Amos was in the driver's seat with the engine running. A.J. roused, just enough to realize what kind of trouble he was in. In another moment or two Araganian would haul him into the car, and they'd be gone and A.J. would end up as roadkill. "Rick…"

Araganian tightened his grip. "Cooperate, professor, and I might let you live."

_Don't believe that for a minute_. There was nothing A.J. could do. There was nothing anyone could do. That was what everyone thought. Everyone except for Rick Simon.

Rick let out a long, loud whistle.

The response was immediate. Cramer bayed ferociously as if he were on the trail of a man-killing cougar. It took only two steps for the hound to come to a full out gallop, and he barreled into Araganian without hesitation.

Araganian's gun went off, but the bullet flew harmlessly into the air, knocked out of position by more than a hundred pounds of bloodhound.

Araganian wasn't finished yet. His one chance for an escape was slipping away; he grabbed for his gun. He needed it to regain control. He needed it to shoot that damn dog and regain control of his hostage.

Don's hours of target practice kicked in. "Freeze!" he yelled, and fired one shot. It went exactly where he wanted: Araganian's gun skittered away and out of reach, knocked there by Don's shot as neatly as the eight ball in the corner pocket. "My next shot goes through your head," he warned. "Give it up." He advanced on Araganian, pulling out his handcuffs.

Amos suddenly developed a spine. He realized that his former employer was now suddenly out of business, and any escape for the hirelings was his to try for. He gunned the engine of the sedan.

Which was when the rest of Don's team showed up, kicking up dust on the dirt road that led to the abandoned building in the woods. Colby slewed the truck around to cover the lane, preventing Amos from shoving the sedan past to freedom. David and Megan jumped out, Colby a half second behind, guns ready to shoot out the window of the sedan and the driver along with it.

"A.J.!" Rick dashed to his brother. "A.J.!" He pushed Cramer out of the way. The dog responded by settling his heavy and wrinkly body next to Rick's brother, fully prepared to guard a wounded pack member, despite that member being previously despised. Cramer licked A.J. across the face.

The first words out of A.J.'s mouth were unprintable, and eloquent.


	9. Brothers 9

Don didn't have time to admire his handiwork. Orders went out: "Megan, we need an ambulance. David, cuff 'em and fast." Don tossed his own set at David; two would be needed, and Don had other things on his mind. He left Araganian sitting on the dirt with the criminal's handgun too far away to reach. "Colby, you're with me. Hurry."

There were two bodies left inside the building, at least one of which was dead and Don's heart was in his mouth, praying that it wasn't _two_ dead bodies.

There was a quick intake of breath beside him; Colby was horrified. He hadn't seen the scene, but he was seeing it now and he didn't like it. Neither one hesitated. They needed to act _now_.

Don grabbed Charlie around the chest, grateful to feel the slim tremors still wracking his brother's body. Tremors meant life. Tremors meant hope. "Cut him down, Colby." He put his mouth next to Charlie's ear. "I've got you, buddy. Just hang on. Just hang on," he pleaded.

Charlie's arms went limp, unable to remain in their present position once Colby finished sawing through the ropes. Colby gently lowered Charlie's arms onto Don's shoulders, helping his team leader ease the mathematician to the floor.

Colby pressed his pocketknife into Don's hands. "Get the ropes off of his wrists," he suggested, "and something clean over that wound. I'll get something to raise his legs. He's in shock."

"He needs a blanket, too." Don went to work on the ropes.

"Got it right here, Don." Megan appeared, her hands full of equipment. "Rick had a field pack in his truck. I've got sterile bandages and a couple of emergency blankets for him." She handed him the bandages, shaking out the silvery blanket herself and tucking it in around the still figure. "We need to get him out of here, to medical care."

"We need an ambulance." Don kept on working.

"They aren't going to be able to get a squad in here. It's a dirt road out there, and it's blocked. We're going to use Rick's truck to get both of them out."

"How is Prof. Simon?" It was a fair question, and it prevented Don from allowing himself to think about how bad his brother looked.

"He looks pretty banged up, but it's a lot more cosmetic. He'll be a hurting puppy for a while. Here, Don, let me." Which was how Don realized that his own hands were shaking too much to apply the clean white dressing over his brother's wound.

Even that slight movement caused Charlie to wake up, a small whimper of protest. It galvanized Don into action. "It's okay, Charlie. We're getting you home. I'm going to take care of everything."

"Don?"

"Charlie!" His brother was awake! Don felt a cold wave of relief wash over him. "Charlie, don't try to move. It's okay; you're safe."

Charlie's teeth began to chatter, so rapidly that Don could barely understand him. "A.J.?"

"He's safe, too," Don said reassuringly. "We got him. We got everyone."

"Safe." Charlie's eyes closed without prompting, and Don couldn't help but touch the pulse in his brother's neck just to be certain that he was still alive. His kid brother looked so pale! Had that witch drained all of his blood?

Someone—Colby, probably—had already tossed something over the woman's face so that they didn't have to look at it. Don was grateful; Charlie didn't need to see that sight, in case he opened his eyes. They couldn't do much about the puddle of blood over her chest but, with luck, Charlie wouldn't notice it. Don prayed for him to keep his eyes closed. "What do we have for a stretcher?"

"Got another blanket, Don. We can carry him on that." Colby laid it down beside Charlie in a long line, head to toe and ready to slide it under the stricken man. "Let's get you out of here, buddy."

Charlie tried to nod in agreement, gave it up as beyond his current capabilities. They'd have to be satisfied with him simply breathing in and out, Don thought. That would do.

Gently they rolled his brother onto the blanket, Don wincing as even that simple movement caused more blood to spurt forth. He'd seen worse injuries—hell, he'd caused some of them when shooting back at people shooting at him—but none of them had been on his brother.

Rick's truck had the best chance of getting them out of the woods quickly, the suspension as high off of the ground as Don's Suburban. David had handcuffed Araganian and Amos, putting them in the back seat of their own sedan to wait for an additional vehicle to transport them to a secure facility.

Don paused before clambering into the back of Rick's truck to sit beside his brother lying weakly on the flatbed. A.J. Simon was in the front cab, the seat back pushed down far as it would go with Rick buckling his brother in. "Don't let them escape, David."

"I won't, Don."

"Don't let me near them." Don meant it.

"I won't." David meant his words as well. "Just get Charlie and Prof. Simon back safe."

* * *

The sun shone brightly outside, but Don kept the shades down, permitting little of the light to come in to disturb his brother. It was hot with summer's heat, but the air conditioning kept the hospital room cool. Don was glad; Charlie's fever was down, but Don wouldn't be surprised if it cycled back up again. It had been doing that, over and over, for the past forty-eight hours. 

Better. That's what the doctors had told his father last night, that Charlie was doing better. All of his insides were neatly stitched up back inside where they belonged, and the three sets of antibiotics that were dripped into the two different intravenous lines in his arms were hard at work cleaning out the bacterial damage. The noise level was low, but all the little medical cheeps and beeps were getting on Don's nerves—all except the one belonging to the green monitor over Charlie's head, the one that said his heart was still beating. That particular monitor was very comforting to Don.

The door opened behind him, and Don nearly pulled his gun before he saw who it was. He shamefacedly tried to pretend that he'd done no such thing.

Rick Simon graciously allowed him the deceit. He indicated the sleeping man in the bed. "How is he?"

"Better." Don settled himself back in the rock hard plastic hospital chair. "Docs won't give me a date for getting him out of here, but at least they think it'll be soon."

"Good to hear." Rick looked around. "Your old man's not here?"

"I sent him home last night. He was beat. He's not as young as he used to be, and Charlie was doing better."

"Good." Rick looked around, looked for something else to say, and dragged his attention back. "When he wakes up, you tell him that I'm grateful. He helped us Simon boys. Without him, without both of you, my brother would have been dead. A little more research, a little more back trail to follow, that Araganian guy would have figured out who was coming after him and A.J. would've been dead meat before anyone had a clue."

Don nodded. "The FBI owes you and your brother, as well. We've been after Araganian for years, and haven't been able to reel him in. Without the work that you did, we'd still have been chasing our tails."

"Yeah." Rick sighed. He stared at the math professor, still lying quietly on the white linens. "You sure they're teaching? It's summer, guy."

"Yeah, I'm sure. Charlie's girlfriend Amita volunteered to do his last lecture and proctor the finals."

"Oh? What about A.J.? Was he teaching, too?"

"Yup." Don remembered the mischievous glint in Larry Fleinhardt's eye as he recounted the tale of the business department. "They got some lawyer guy in to give your brother's last lectures, some big shot from Boston visiting some friends of the dean; guy's name is Crane. Dennis, I think; something like that. Your brother, however, is a lot more organized than mine. He already had his final prepared for his students. Amita is tearing her hair out, wishing that Charlie hadn't left his for the last minute."

"That's A.J.," Rick agreed. "Organized. Right now I think he's trying to organize his pills by size, shape, and color. The nurses made me swear that I'd get him out of their hair as soon as possible this morning." Rick sighed, staring at the still figure on the white sheets. "You tell 'im that the Simon brothers owe him a big one."

"I'll do that," Don agreed.

* * *

Don brought the Suburban to a gentle stop, well satisfied that his brother had been able to sleep for the entire two-hour trip down to San Diego. Charlie, being Charlie, had brought his laptop along, swearing that he needed to catch up on his research, needed to make the hours count after losing so many days to the hospital. Don grinned with the memory: the laptop never made it out of its case. Instead, the black leather bag had slipped down to the floor of the Suburban and stayed there while its owner closed his eyes and napped. _Charlie's gonna be pissed when he wakes up_, Don thought. _Good. Let him. He needs the rest._

The salt air of the marina smelled good, and Don inhaled his fair share of it, stepping out of the Suburban and crossing around to the passenger's side. He pulled open the door. "Time to get up, buddy," he called.

"Wha—?" Charlie tried to open his eyes. He succeeded on the second try. He looked around. "Where are we?"

"Right where I told you we were going, Charlie," Don said. "You need rest and recuperation. That means that no one from CalSci should be able to find you. Not your students, not your fellow professors—well, maybe one professor, but he's recuperating here too, same as you."

"Oh. Right. Mildred Finch."

Which wasn't fair on Charlie's part, for Dr. Finch's only contribution to this mess had been to offer to help Amita with administering the final to Charlie's class and grading it afterward, but Don wasn't about to argue. If thinking that Millie Finch was annoyed over Charlie not finishing his teaching course was going to get the man to rest two hours away from home, then Don was all for it. "Right," he agreed. "Remember? We left Dad to deal with her."

"Oh. Right," Charlie repeated blankly. He tried to slide down out of the Suburban, forgetting that his knees had the stamina of a day old kitten.

Don caught him easily, propping him up against the vehicle. "Slow down, buddy."

"I can walk," Charlie complained, clutching onto his brother's shoulders and trying to catch his breath. "You don't have to treat me like an invalid."

"No? Who practically fell on his nose going from the hospital bed to the wheelchair right beside it, when he was discharged? Who needed help getting into my car?"

"This is not a car, it's a tree house," Charlie grumbled. He tried to stagger toward the dock.

"Nope. Not that one. Not that boat." Don slipped Charlie's arm around his neck, going for fifty percent amused and fifty percent alarmed at how easily the man toppled over. _No, make that forty percent amused. He's got enough bruises to qualify as the loser of a heavyweight boxing championship, and that's before we consider the slice that that crazy chick put in his belly. He's lucky to be alive_.

Rick appeared at the top of the gangplank. "Yo. Thought you'd never make it."

"Traffic," Don called back up. "Tourists going back and forth from Disney to SeaWorld."

"You're here now," was Rick's response. "Let me give you a hand," he added, hooking a hand under Charlie's free shoulder.

"Gently," Don insisted, feeling Charlie wince. Bruises were there, and gentleness was the name of the game. Together both older brothers maneuvered the mathematician toward a seat on the deck of Rick's boat.

A.J. was already there, sunning himself in the heat with his shirt hung over the arm of the chair. His rib cage was dark with fading injuries, but his black eye had begun to pale. He started to get up, to help with arranging the chairs. It was hard work, standing up, and his own sore spots were interfering.

Rick considered the situation. "Cramer," he ordered simply. "Lean."

The bloodhound, already positioned at the base of A.J.'s seat, hoisted himself onto four legs and pushed his nose into a delicate portion of A.J.'s anatomy. A.J., too weak to resist, toppled back into his chair with a grunt.

Rick grinned. "Good boy."

"Rick—"

"Didn't you hear those docs?" Rick smirked. "Told you to rest, A.J. That means no prancing about. It means sitting your ass in that chair and doing nothing but catching rays."

"Spoilsport," A.J. grumbled.

Charlie had another concern. "Don, my laptop is in the Suburban. I need it—"

Don turned to Rick. "Think Cramer can keep both of 'em under control?"

"No brainer, dude." Rick turned to his hound. "Cramer, on guard."

Cramer growled happily. And licked his chops.

Rick turned back to the other older brother. "You up for getting a couple of cold six-packs at the bar with me?"

"You're on, Rick. My treat."

"That's what I like to hear."

Don's next words were aimed at both younger brothers. "And we'll pick up a few steaks for a couple of invalids and their baby-sitter. For a job well done, you understand."

"Don—!"

"Rick—!"

Rick grinned, following Don down the gangplank. "Later, guys."

Charlie eyed the bloodhound. "What do you think, A.J.? Can we outwit him?"

A.J. sighed, and closed his eyes with resignation. "Not a chance, Charlie. Sometimes I think he's smarter than you and I put together."

Charlie himself looked at the hound, then at Don's Suburban speeding away with the two older brothers and his laptop. He too sighed, and closed his eyes.

The End.

* * *

A/N: go over to the forum "Calling All Authors!" to find out who Rick's dog is named after. 


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